Comment by reaperducer
5 years ago
Agreed. People on HN think autopay is some kind of default way of financial management. It's not.
In the early 2000's, State Farm's auto insurance auto pay hit my bank account, not for the $250 it has been deducting for years, but for $25,000! It caused my rent and all of my other bills to bounce.
To its credit, State Farm paid all of my associates fees and sent a letter to my landlord, but it took months to get everything straightened out.
Do not trust autopay.
For every one case like this there are millions of people with decade+ streaks of no issue. I will continue to trust auto pay because it is such a life simplification and the consequences of accidentally missing a payment is pretty annoying (a much more likely event than autopay messing up by thousands of dollars)
In my personal friend circle, I have heard way too many stories of people missing paying a bill due to mistakes, forgetting, losing the bill. One friend's bar even had their power cut off due to the part-time staff forgetting to mention the bill arrived.
Not once have I heard a story of auto pay go wrong.
One safer alternative is to setup recurring checks that go out for bill pay. Many more controls there to stop stuff like this and it is done by the bank, not by some company whose specialty is not finance.