Set It And Forget It

Let the machine pay your bills for you.

Memory, but especially mine, is faulty. The portion of my brain reserved for minutiae is filled with countless bits of useless information: an old address for a house I haven’t lived in in over a decade; Kim Kardashian’s middle name; where I hid the watercolors I haven’t used in months. I can remember a birthday of a person that I haven’t thought about in years. I’m very good at recalling where someone put something when they came into my house. The important things that I should remember — like the dates my bills are due — always evade me. I’m bad at paying my bills on time, not because I don’t want to (maybe) or because I can’t (sometimes), but because I never remember when they’re due.

Clearly, automatic payment was created for highly intelligent idiots like myself, incapable of holding three very specific and unwavering dates in their mind. The bills are always due around the same time of the month; I always get an email saying how much I owe and when I need to send it by. But more often than not, unless it’s been set up to automatically deduct from my bank account, I will delete the email, throw away the letters, and pretend like it never happened until the automated calls start coming in, begging me to just give them the money I owe.

Like everything else, I have very specific rules for which bills deserve the benefit of automatic pay, weighted by the necessity of the utility attached. The electric bill is deducted from my account every month within days of the 15th. The internet bill, however, is not. Given that paying that bill provides a service necessary to me to do my job, you’d think that I’d handle it with some regularity and even a hint of responsibility. I try. I really do. But there’s a strange niggling fear that eats away at me that if I automatically deduct that bill from my checking account, the minute it leaves my bank account, I’ll be destitute.

This has never happened. I am way too aware of how much money I have and where it is and I always anticipate the monthly withdrawal with plenty of time to spare. A solid $120 plus another $80 or so leaving my checking account within days of each other will not bankrupt me. The day or so it takes my roommates to Venmo me their share of the bill won’t, either. The money is always there.

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