There isn’t any payment we don’t handle that isn’t done online and
set up with auto pay. My credit card, my husband’s credit card, our Roth
IRA contributions, and our tithe are all set up through auto pay. What I
just found out last week didn’t lead to late fees, but it did take
three whole months before I realized it was happening.
The hubs
and I set up an auto payment for a biweekly amount (I’ll use $250
biweekly for my example) to go from our checking account to our church.
Our church decided to hire an intern as a full time pastor this summer
and the church was asked to chip in on his salary for the next year
until his salary was worked into the church’s budget. We signed up to
give a little extra starting in September and we checked the box to just
add $75 on to our current giving. You might be thinking “Oh so you were
actually giving $150 a month extra since you had biweekly payments set
up?” Nope.
I didn’t realize the payment was changed to monthly
instead of biweekly, so that meant our giving drastically went down.
Here’s the breakdown of what happened:
Previous set up: $250 biweekly (scheduled for the 1st & 15th day of each month)
New (correct) set up: $325 monthly (1st day of each month) + $250 monthly (15th day of each month)
New (actual) set up: $325 monthly (1st day of each month)
I
didn’t notice this until I realized our checking account kept going up
each month. We usually have about the same amount in our checking
account at the end of each month because everything else gets
reallocated to some kind of savings or payment. A huge chunk of it gets
moved to the savings account for our home. When I saw the numbers
creeping up, I looked back at our past statements and realized there was
only one monthly charge coming from our church. In this example, those
three months of missed payments add up to $750.
We were able to
submit a one time donation to catch up on our missed giving and I
corrected the giving amount through our church’s auto-pay set up. I only
skim through our bank account online maybe once a week because we enter
in our purchases in our handy homemade excel sheet. Our excel sheet
accounts for the new biweekly payments but that obviously wasn’t
happening in reality. Thank goodness it wasn’t a worse-case scenario. I
couldn’t imagine if we accidentally fell 3 months behind on a credit
card or mortgage payment!
source: lifeandmyfinances.com
