How do people with multiple credit cards keep track of their due dates and not miss payments?

Question

I never spend more than I have and always intend to pay the full balance on my credit card statements. Because the due date changes and because they are different for each card, I sometimes forget and get charged interest. I would like to avoid this by setting up auto payments.

I want to double check my thinking is correct. I have several different credit cards. I had looked at my past statements and taken note of when the due dates have been. Usually they are in a 4 day range per card. The minimum payment is always $10. So if I set up auto payments for a few days before the earliest day of the month the balance has been due on for each card and pay $10, would this avoid interest fees?

Or does it not work like this? What exactly happens if you do or do not make the "minimum payment" since you would have to pay interest if you did not pay off the full balance anyway?

As an aside, I used to work for a service provider. In training we were showed how to change the billing date for a customer and that it's in the company's interest to make it easy for customers to pay their bills. I tried asking a couple of the credit cards and they said they can't do this. Is this common?

Answer 1

No, paying only the minimum does not avoid interest charges. If you do not pay the full balance by the due date, then you will pay interest on some or all of the total balance, depending on the terms of the card (a common method is to calculate the average daily balance and multiply that by the equivalent daily rate).

If you do not pay even the minimum balance, you pay interest but might also pay a late fee (which may also accrue interest depending on the card terms). It may also show up as a missed payment on your credit report.

The only way to avoid paying interest at all is to pay off the full statement balance each month.

If you have so many cards that you cannot reliably keep track of the payment schedules, then you either need to set up automatic payments paying the full balance each month by the due date (all of my cards allow you to make a payment on the due date or N days before), or stop using so many cards.

it's in the company's interest to make it easy for customers to pay their bills

Yes, but it's also in the company's interest for customers to not pay their bills on time, since interest and penalties are a huge source of revenue for credit card companies.

Answer 2

In the UK the system is called Direct Debit and has existed for decades; the credit card company (or any payee) submits a request to pay the owed amount directly to your bank and your bank pays it, provided they have your signed agreement to do so. The amount can be variable, although there is surprising lack of clarity explaining this. I've set this up and don't think about it anymore. Availability of direct debit to pay bills to well-known institutions is more or less universal in this country.

Answer 3

I apply the K.I.S.S. principle and pay all my credit card balances at the end of the month, no matter the due date.

Benefits:

• I pay for things in the month I buy them.
• I'm never charged interest.
• It doesn't matter if I forget the official due date.

The banks don't care that I don't send payments on the due date, as long as they get their money before the due date, and EOM is always before the due date, even if the due date is the 28th (since this month's EOM is before next month's 28th).

Answer 4

Everything is set to autopay in full. I have most every account also set to send me an e-mail for any charge over $0.

Answer 5

You are allowed to change the due date for your credit cards. Last year I decided to change the due dates for all 7 of my credit cards to be the same date, because I too occasionally forgot to pay off a credit card on time.

(Helpful tip: if you almost always pay a credit card off on time, and then you are late on a payment, call the credit card's customer service and ask them to waive the late fee and interest. I have done this a few times and they have always credited the late fee and any interest back to my account.)

Now all of my credit cards have a due date of the 2nd of each month, and I have an end-of-month calendar reminder to pay off my credit cards.

Important note: Before you go about changing the due date of your credit cards, make sure you are 100% certain about the new due date. One of my credit cards told me that I could only change the due date once every 5 years.

Answer 6

If you make the minimum payment on time you avoid a late fee. You pay interest on any statement balance remaining after the due date (terms/calculations can vary).

I have a google sheet with a list of due dates and an indicator of whether or not they have been paid (yellow = scheduled, green = money left my account). I do this for automatic payments too, just in case something goes wrong it doesn't go unnoticed for too long.

My credit cards offer 'automatic payments' and can be the minimum due or statement balance. I typically do the automatic minimum due well before the due-date since my credit card balances vary wildly month to month I like to review rather than auto-pay full statement balance.

I thought choosing a due date was pretty common, but have no data on the topic. It makes sense that it varies by bank/product.

Answer 7

How do people with multiple credit cards keep track of their due dates and not miss payments?

Well, the first step is to assess why the heck do you use so many cards and inflict this problem on yourself?

I have well over 10 credit cards which I've signed up for to take advantage of various sign-on bonuses like 30% off a purchase for a store card, or $200 cash back when you spend $1,000 in the first 3 months, etc...

Most of them sit peacefully in a little box and expire silently as the years roll on.

Never, never, never do I ever try to juggle rotating cash-back perks like one card is great for gas, one card is great at restaurants, one card is great at Amazon, etc...

If you're juggling for perks then you are playing directly into their trap by not having a sole source of information about your spending; this often leads to overspending.

I have a decade-old CC which used to be my main but now I just keep it alive via automatic bill pay for Internet for the credit history longevity. I have a fairly new main CC which I use for all other things. A $10k+ limit on both CC's guarantees me peace-of-mind if I ever had to make an unexpectedly large transaction.

Answer 8

Set auto-pay to minimum, but manually pay the full amount.

This is a "Dead Man Switch". If you do nothing, the minimum payment auto-fires, and makes sure your payment is not late, so you avoid penalties for that.

Of course, paying less than full means interest happens if you fail to pay in full... but that is the choice you say you want, for cash flow reasons. I think that's reasonable, and I do it myself.

"Wait. How does the bank know what my minimum payment is?" It doesn't. Auto-pay is not a "Push" thing from the bank to the credit card. It's a "Pull" thing - the credit card issuer initiates the withdrawal from your bank account, and the bank trusts the credit card company. So you set up auto-pay with the credit card, not with your bank.

It's not hard for the bank to authenticate that EFT as legitimate, since it's coming from a major bank like Chase or Capital One, who will make good any mistakes.

If you find that creepy and don't want to give the CC your bank info, that is fine by me... I felt the same for many years but relented when I just didn't have the time to deal with it by hand anymore. Of course NOW, you can do "push" payments from the bank to the credit card, via services like Bill Pay. But that requires you to guess your minimum payment.

For most banks, manual payments you make before the auto-pay date will reduce the auto-payment. If the minimum auto-pay is $300 yet you paid $200 manually, the auto-pay will fire at only $100. If you had paid $500 manually, the auto-pay will be $0 that month. (that is usually the case for me). However not every card does this.

Most banks will change your due date, if you ask.

So talk to a human (or sometimes you can do it on a website) and ask them. Setting it 15 days after your rent or mortgage pmt is not a bad idea.

Answer 9

I have autopay set up on mine in different ways, in conjunction with their purposes.

• My card I use primarily for online purchases I have set up for autopay for the minimum, as it has highly variable amounts and also needs the most scrutiny
• My card I use for Costco I have set up to autopay the full amount, as it has fairly consistent, low amounts, only a few transactions, and a low maximum as well.
• My card I use for most in-person payments I also pay the minimum auto-pay.
• My "backup" card that is set up as my auto-failover for checking I auto-pay the full card amount (but it's always zero - if it were to get used due to having something odd happen with checking, I'd be alerted when it is used, and fix it then).
• My two "store" credit cards autopay the full amount.

Monthly I review each card, all at the same time (regardless of payment deadlines). The two I autopay the minimum, I then schedule full balance payments at that time. The others I verify that the amounts are reasonable (the store cards I usually have zero balance on, as well as my backup card) and let auto-pay handle them.

The auto-pay-minimum allows me to guarantee I don't miss a payment (and get a negative mark on my credit history) if something happens and I forget to evaluate a card, but obviously I want to avoid interest, so it's important to look every month (in addition to being important for just knowing what's going on and catching fraud).

Answer 10

While you can certainly set up auto-payments there are other ways to avoid paying interest. The main mistake in your logic is that you are overly concerned about the due dates. Pay on your own schedule. The credit card company has to issue a statement roughly a month before the payment due date. Depending on the relative grouping on your payment due dates you can pick either one or two (15 days apart) days of the month where you can go online, look at your credit card statements and schedule your payment for the full statement amount. You do not have to pay the full amount up to the due date to not pay interest. Only the full amount on the last statement.

Answer 11

The most manageable method from my experience would be to regularly check online and pay off all your credit cards in an interval that is short enough to never miss any given due date.

For example, in my case, I'd check all my cards at least once a week (and paying in full when there's any amount lower than the credit limit), even with the "payback time" of one month, regardless of whether or not I remember if any particular card had been used.

Answer 12

Because the due date changes

That's quite weird. Maybe they could vary by a day or two due to 1/12 of a year not being exactly equal to 30, but I don't see why they would vary by four days.

So if I set up auto payments for a few days before the earliest day of the month the balance has been due on for each card and pay $10, would this avoid interest fees?

Other posters have been saying that if you pay off your bill, you don't pay interest on that month's charges, but I don't think that's quite right. My understanding is that if you don't have a balance at the beginning of the billing cycle (i.e. you paid of the last bill entirely), then you don't get charged interest on this billing cycle's charges, if you pay them off by the due date. Also, this isn't a legal requirement, just a common industry practice.

What exactly happens if you do or do not make the "minimum payment" since you would have to pay interest if you did not pay off the full balance anyway?

If you don't pay the minimum payment, you get charged a service fee.

I tried asking a couple of the credit cards and they said they can't do this. Is this common?

My understanding is that it's rather uncommon. Maybe they thought you were asking to change the billing date for charges that were already made? When you change the billing date, it doesn't apply until at least the next billing cycle, possibly not until the billing cycle after that (and since the billing date is at the end of that billing cycle, you have the rest of this billing cycle, plus all of the next billing cycle, until it takes effect).

As for how to keep track, besides changing the due date, you could put reminders on your calendar (phone and/or computer, or Outlook if you have that), get in the habit of checking a particular day of the week, paying ahead of time, or set up autopay.

Answer 13

How do people with multiple credit cards keep track of their due dates and not miss payments?

The question title has two parts. Here's how I personally do it:

How do I keep track of my due dates? I don't.

How do I not miss payments? I have it set up to auto-pay the full amount before the due date.

Answer 14

It sounds like your misunderstanding comes from trying to set up automatic payments the wrong way. All of the credit cards that I have used have an option, on the credit card's web site, to set up "auto-pay."

You have to enter your bank account details (account number and routing number), and then it asks you if you want to pay the bill in full, pay the minimum payment, or some fixed value. It also might prompt you to select whether to pay as soon as you're billed or on the due date.

In order not to get charged any interest fees or late fees, you should select to pay the bill in full. Whether you pay right away or on the due date is up to you and shouldn't affect anything.

In this way, whenever you owe a credit card balance, the credit card company will take the money from your bank account (using the details you provided), on the day you specified, and you will never be late. If something happens that isn't your fault (a glitch in their system, etc) that is their problem to fix, and you still won't get charged late fees (and if you do by mistake, they will refund them because it was their fault).

I have all of my cards set up this way. You only have to do it once for each card, it's super easy, and my payments are never late!

Answer 15

For each of my credit cards, I have the credit-card issuing bank automatically debit my checking account for the minimum payment due on the due date for that card. This ensures that as long as I have enough money in my checking account I'm never late for a payment.
Note that this is something I configure in the online portal of the issuing bank for each of the credit cards individually, and not something I configure with my 'main' bank where my checking account is held.

Then I choose some convenient day in every month - typically on the 3rd weekend (when I know that all my utility bills, mortgage, car loan, etc have all been paid), and I log in to each of the credit card issuing banks' online portals and make an additional payment to cover whatever is still due for the most recent statement period (or sometimes when I know I've made a large purchase that I'm planning to pay off over a couple of months on one of my lower-interest cards I decide on the amount of the partial payment).
Depending on the specific due date for each card, this manual payment might end up 'cancelling' that minimum auto-pay that I have set up - but I have the peace of mind from knowing that even if something happens and I forget or am not able to perform my 3rd weekend manual payment that minimum amount will always be paid and I won't get punished with a missed-payment fee or hit to my credit report.

I'm aware that sometimes I do end up carrying a balance over for a month or 2, but since my spending averaged over time doesn't exceed my income I just regard the small amount of interest I pay as a "convenience fee" for allowing me to make the occasional large purchase and not have to balance everything down to the last cent every month.
This behavior may not work for everyone though as it requires a general awareness of how your spending levels track your income and the discipline to not out-spend yourself all the time.

The way you seem to be currently managing your payments is through a push from your primary account over into your credit card account(s), whereas what I do is a pull, initiated from the credit card issuing bank.
This works for me because I don't have to track the minimum amount or the due date to avoid those late payment penalties.

Answer 16

People with many credit cards can manage this effectively using several approaches, sometimes in combination:

1. Setup autopay.
2. Setup payment due notifications and manually respond to them.
3. Manually log in to all accounts a couple times each month and manually make payments on accounts that are due. Just twice about two weeks apart is enough to guarantee you'd always have logged in before a payment due would be late.
4. Change all your statement generation dates or payment due dates to the same or close to the same. Some providers let you pick a payment due date and adjust statement dates, some let you pick a target statement date with your exact payment due date varying depending on when statements actually generate. Then you can just do #3 once a month.

As for interest, generally, you are not charged interest unless you are carrying a balance beyond a statement period. For example, if your balance is zero, then at the start of a new statement period N, you make a purchase, you won't be charged interest at statement N + 1. Instead, the earliest you'd be charged interest is at N + 2. So, if you're just losing track of your statement date, then you can easily avoid interest by zeroing your balance then waiting until a new statement to make future charges.

Also, as a reminder, interest charges are based on statement dates, not payment due dates. So you can still end up with interest charges even if you're making payments before your payment due date.

Minimum payments depend on the statement balance and a variety of other factors. So, you cannot count on the minimum payment being at most $10. And like mentioned, making payments before your due date isn't for strictly avoiding interest but avoiding being late.

There are numerous ways to keep track. Paper statements, electronic statements, notifications of statements and payment due, email services that automatically create calendar events from such emails, your own manual calendar events to check all your card accounts, third party services that aggregate all your accounts and send you their own notifications, alerts, calendar invites, etc for statements and payments due - or even will let you connect your bank account and make payments on your behalf.

Answer 17

Pay on the same day every month

I pay all of my bills on the same day each month (or rather, within a couple days of the same day each month). This works for me because all of my bills either have due dates after that day of the month. I keep track of what bills I have and when I paid them in a simple Excel spreadsheet (this is fixed throughout the year for the most part) [ I also keep track in Quicken]. I pay from my bank's online BillPay system, and get most of my bills through that system as PDFs. For bills which aren't available through my bank's BillPay, I log into the appropriate website and grab the bill. I also have bill amounts available via Quicken's bill service. This takes me about 30-60 minutes every month (between downloading PDF bills, setting up payments, tracking in Quicken and Excel, etc).

I prefer explicitly sending money out of my bank rather than having the biller debit my bank account. This is partly psychological (I see the money going out) and partly practical as I don't want the biller to accidentally mischarge me and be out that money in my bank account. I will, however, have billers automatically charge a credit card when they offer that service (with no fee).

Change your payment date when needed

The key to this working is getting all your bills to have similar payment due dates. For me, this mostly worked out by chance, but many card issuers will let you change the payment due date, and they typically limit this to one change per year or something similar. You can also call your utility providers and ask to change the due date on those bills.

Find a date which works for you (maybe you get paid on the 15th and 30th, so you could aim for all your due dates to be around the 20th of the month). For some bills, you may wind up paying quite early - my mortgage due date is the 1st of the month, for example, but I just pay it around the 15th of the month before...no problem at all. Whatever date you choose, make sure it is after the close date / statement date for any variable bills (i.e., except mortgage and car loans) - you need to know how much to pay.

It will take a couple months to get all of the dates adjusted, and may require paying some bills more often than usual at first (to get the new date set up) or much earlier than expected (to "get ahead" of the due date). Once it's going, it's very easy to remember though.

Answer 18

In a country with a traditional monthly (instead of weekly) salary payment:

Bills (including CC interest-free payment dates) are all aligned with the common paydays.

You get your salary. You pay all bills (rent, electricity, water, internet, phone, car lease, other credits payments, etc...) a day or two after.

CCs are paid last because you can pay less than the full amount if the month is not good.

Some money left? Good, ...but check twice for something missed.