Ask HN: What service would you recommend for managing monthly bills? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What service would you recommend for managing monthly bills?

4 pointswuliwong10 comments

I recently had to be issued a new credit card because of some fraudulent charges. Now, I am going through the process of trying to remember all the places that I have my old card number saved and update with my new info.

I am particularly scattered with my financials as with "organization" in general. I'm the guy with 3 monitors that have 20 windows open and a browser with 10+ tabs at all time. I've always thought of that as my "in memory" bookmark cache.

That being said, I am interested in consolidating my bill paying activities and wanted to tap the collective wisdom of HN. I have a Mint account (I created out of curiosity) which I believe is a reasonable choice to use for reoccurring payments. I also could use my bank's software which I have to say has gotten pretty good with respect to other functionality. I would love to hear your experience and recommendations for these or other services which allow you to pay all (or as many as possible) bills from a single account.

Thanks!

I use a combination of Mint + a single credit card which gives me a fair money back (with one card for me and one for my partner), has no foreign fees and has an app that provides instant notifications of all charges. I put as much as possible on auto-pay, and also make frequent CC payments to maintain a healthy balance level on my CC.

While I could increase returns by managing multiple credit cards with different payoffs and promotions, transferring balances, etc. I don't feel the additional money is worth the headache. The same for not using autopay, mailing checks, whatever, takes too much time and headaches.

This way, all my purchases get notified on my mobile, and I can track all of them (and get reasonably good automatica categorization) on Mint (as well as some basic budgeting), without a lot of complexity. Since you can check all the expenses on mint, you can use tags on them to remember which ones are recurring and on autopay on your cc, and change them easily.

I have a nagging concern that security-wise, consolidated financial sites like Mint will always be an attractive nuisance because they're single collection point for a huge number of credentials for financial account access. So, right now, I use my banks online bill pay to push payments alongside a spreadsheet containing a check list of payment accounts broken down by month. This lets me add check list entries for things like DMV renewal payments on their months, property tax, etc.

I'd be interested in this as well - preferably something that could be shared with my wife / mobile that we could both document where / on what we spend money on.

We've been getting into using points based credit cards and paying the balances immediately a: for the points and b: to try to improve credit and between a few of them, it can be difficult to track everything

I have a friend that uses Mint and has told me that you really have to go "all in" with Mint but then it is really helpful. He said he still feels a little nervous having a single company with all this financial information about him but Mint has lots of things built in to monitor your financial health. I will probably go with Mint unless I hear something that changes my mind in this thread.

Have you looked at Mint?

Years ago I have when they were on their own - now that their owned by Intuit - I'm a little bothered by that (not that it's any worse or better then Google having all my email hah)

Last I remember, I thought the mint interface was to complicated (for me) to use it easily on a daily basis.

Maybe theres opportunity here for an app - shared between family members (you might have teenagers you give a CC to incase of emergency) - add just card names, and input where / when / $$ was spent. quick and simple. Maybe GPS helps fill in the where part.

A lot of CC companies have that already in their mobile apps. I get a notification instantly whenever my CC or my partner's is used, as well as value and merchant.

Mint has really sucked for me since Intuit bought it. They switched out the backend, and my accounts stopped updating.

I've loved BillGuard as a Mint replacement. It's much more user-friendly, and it creates a collective protection system -- when enough other people flag a charge as fraudulent, it automatically lets you know if you have the same charge.

Cool, I will check out BillGuard. It seems that to pay bills through Mint you actually have to use a separate application called Mint Bills. I signed in with my Mint account but it looks like there is little to no crossover. Very weird. I also set up my first test bill using my bank's website and it was very confusing. I actually haven't even figured out how to make it auto-pay.

+1 for autopay. I typically put all I can on a credit card and just set it and forget it(water, electric, cable, etc). I'll check that periodically on personalcapital.com (similar to mint but better investment tracking IMO).

I definitely setup autopay as much as possible but I am exploring a single place to pay all my bills from so if I change cards, I won't have to re-enter my info in 20 different places. I've been using paypal whenever a service allows me. This has the desired effect but it isn't universal by any stretch.

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