Earning very penny of interest

[LivingAlmostLarge]

Do you guys just pay bills when they come in or do you just try to keep $ in savings and the day before or day say a CC is due. I am juggling too many CC right now and I get somewhat anxious and I like just paying off stuff when I see a lot of bills that I charged and are upcoming. Yes it's my anxiety. But my checking earns 0.01% so it doesn't seem worth it. And savings is up to 0.6% Also seems ridiculous to even care. I just like paying all my bills and seeing my account going down and knowing that's what I have. I have been burning money like crazy this past week paying for everything so my bills are large and I want to figure out what I have.

[james.hendrickson]

I just pay the bills as they come in.

My checking account doesn't pay any interest at all, so it doesn't make sense to leave the cash in the account when I have bills that could potentially charge 20% or 25%.

[scfr]

I think it depends where a person is on their financial trajectory. I don't need to squeeze every penny out of savings at my stage of life. I like knowing things are taken care of, in advance, so that if an emergency pops up (i.e., mom dies or winds up in the hospital again) and I get distracted I won't miss a payment. Heck, I even paid our entire property tax bill earlier this month even though 2 payments are allowed.

[disneysteve]

I pay bills when they come. Our account doesn’t earn interest and even if it did I wouldn’t care. It would be greatly offset by making even one late payment because something got forgotten or misplaced or buried on my desk.

Actually, almost all of our recurring bills are on auto-pay anyway. The only ones I manually pay are the credit cards and various local taxes. Everything else either charges to a credit card or draws from our checking account.

[Smilinggirl]

I pay things when they come in. I also pay as many bills as possible just once a year, simply because I don't like to pay bills. Sometimes they offer a discount for paying in full, sometimes not, but it's more about convenience for me.

[kork13]

Uh.... I dunno. 95% of our bills are on auto-pay, and I don't really pay attention to exactly when they're actually due.
I guess in general, when I have the option to choose, I normally setup my auto payments to pay within 3-5 days of the due date. I've always done that.... But not necessarily for any specific reasoning.

[james.hendrickson]

Do you guys just pay bills when they come in or do you just try to keep $ in savings and the day before or day say a CC is due. I am juggling too many CC right now and I get somewhat anxious and I like just paying off stuff when I see a lot of bills that I charged and are upcoming. Yes it's my anxiety. But my checking earns 0.01% so it doesn't seem worth it. And savings is up to 0.6% Also seems ridiculous to even care. I just like paying all my bills and seeing my account going down and knowing that's what I have. I have been burning money like crazy this past week paying for everything so my bills are large and I want to figure out what I have.

Living - one more thought I had on this topic.

What you're basically talking about is sequencing your bills to keep the balance in your checking account as high as possible This was a good strategy in the 1970s and 1980s when interest rates were higher. That said, I think the Fed will likely have to raise interest rates in the US to combat inflation - and probably by a lot, at least four or four and a half percentage points. Once that happens, a good cash conservation strategy actually will make more sense.

[disneysteve]

Uh.... I dunno. 95% of our bills are on auto-pay, and I don't really pay attention to exactly when they're actually due.
I guess in general, when I have the option to choose, I normally setup my auto payments to pay within 3-5 days of the due date. I've always done that.... But not necessarily for any specific reasoning.

I'm pretty sure all of the stuff we have on auto-pay (gas, electric, water, cable, cell phones, insurance) just draw the money out on the due date. I don't think I picked the dates for any of them although there might be an option to change it if I needed to. I have no idea.

[disneysteve]

What you're basically talking about is sequencing your bills to keep the balance in your checking account as high as possible This was a good strategy in the 1970s and 1980s when interest rates were higher. That said, I think the Fed will likely have to raise interest rates in the US to combat inflation - and probably by a lot, at least four or four and a half percentage points. Once that happens, a good cash conservation strategy actually will make more sense.

True. Back when our accounts were paying 5 or 5.5%, holding onto the money longer made sense and I did play that game. Now with checking paying nothing and savings paying 0.5%, it's just not worth it.

[kork13]

What you're basically talking about is sequencing your bills to keep the balance in your checking account as high as possible.

Not quite the same, but thinking again about the OP question... Maintaining a relatively stable checking account balance has probably been the driving factor in somewhat controlling when my bills get auto-paid (neither paying bills ASAP nor delaying payment to the last possible moment).

We've always gotten paid twice monthly (1st & 15th), so to some extent I've balanced when certain equivalent expenses are paid to stay balanced between each half of the month. As examples... We have two main credit cards (each ~$600-$1000/mo), and one gets paid around the 6th, the other is paid around the 24th. Gas+phone bills on the 3rd, power bill on the 25th (each ~$100/mo). DS2's preschool tuition on the 5th, DKs' 529 contributions on the 16th (each ~$500/mo).

So we've balanced when expenses get paid in order to level out our checking account balance -- we never have a significant overage or shortage of funds in the account, but rather it stays mostly within a moderate range (~$2k-$6k), with only momentary blips above/below that range.

[Jluke]

My active banking account that gets direct deposit and bills paid out of has sub accounts (savings, xmas, money market).

with rates so low I am not trying to maximize interest otherwise some of the cash would be at CapitalOne . Actually I want to make as little as possible in this account so it doesn’t add to my taxes.

[LivingAlmostLarge]

You've all convinced me. I am not going to worry about 0.6%.It's giving me ulcer.

[bjl584]

It depends.
Sometimes I pay them when they come, other times I wait until the week of that they are due.
No real strategy or reason for doing so.

My checking account earns interest, but not enough to move the needle to justify hanging onto bills until the 11th hour

[riverwed070707]

I like simplicity and I have way too many bills to be sifting through due dates. Similar to Kork, everything that is a set amount is on autopay which takes care of about 2/3 of my bills. For everything else, I collect the bills in a basket near where we read the mail throughout the month and the third Saturday of the month I sit down for 20 minutes to schedule payments and do my monthly bookkeeping.

[myrdale]

I would equate waiting to pay a bill until the due date to not filling up the gas tank until it is on empty. You might find running out of gas on the side of the road to be more expensive than the $0.01 in interest you earned.

I never let my gas tank get below a quarter tank, and I have never paid a late fee*.

I may hold onto bills for a couple of days until I have two or three that I can pay at the same time.

Water, cable, and phone usually show up at the same time and have a two to three week window to pay. I've had problems with the electric bill showing up the day after it was due! Georgia Power insisted not to sweat it as they have a 10 day grace period pass the due date. This past week with my most current electric bill thought it arrived with two weeks until due so who knows!

*The only late fees I've paid was when the post office delivered my cable and gas bill late (this was about 6 months ago now). I called and got the late fees refunded as credits after the checks had cleared.