Fido bill pay and the newer Fido CC

[bingybear]

Fighting with myself on the best way to pay. With other cards and most other bills I just get an ebill and have bill pay take care of it. I set the bill pay account to keep about $3k in it and have it pull from another brokerage account the has dividend paying ETFs in it.
The newer Fido credit cards have an auto pay feature that will (based on my limited understanding) just make an ACH grab for the money in the account indicated. While bill pay knows what is set to be paid and can pull some $ from the secondary account when needed, the auto pay has no knowledge about that. I would assume if there were insufficient funds the auto pay would either get too little or refused if not enough funds were sitting in the account when the ACH request came in. And with bill pay not knowing the ACH request was coming, it would not pre-fund for the ACH request as it may for normal bill pays.

Now I may have much of the above wrong. But I did not get much real help from either Fido or Elan. Right now I just set up the Elan CC bill in bill pay manually.

I'm curious how others have set this up? If using auto pay, did you set up a different account or keep extra $ to cover the Fido bill? Or did you use a different account?

some other way to deal with it?

I use to have bill pay directly from a brokerage account. This would have have worked. I normally don't keep much in my cash management account.

 

[Another Reader]

I pay the Elan bill by manually having Elan pull the money from the bank when I schedule the payment. I want to review all transactions and insure there is more than enough money in the checking account before the bill is paid.

 

[kimcdougc]

I have the Fidelity cc on autopay from my checking which is linked to Fido account.

 

[audreyh1]

I use my Fidelity Cash management account to pay my Fido CC. It's not exactly autopay but my Fidelity credit card tab knows how much is owed and I schedule it there.

 

[Cobra9777]

I pay most of our bills using the Elan CC. I pay Elan using bill-pay from our Fidelity Cash Management Account. I'm not yet comfortable putting credit cards on auto-pay nor do I use eBill. I just schedule manual bill-pays after receiving and checking the statement.

The CMA receives direct deposit of our 2 pensions as well as rental income. We have a separate taxable brokerage account where dividends accumulate. I just transfer them to the CMA periodically, usually shortly after they're received. So there's generally enough money in the CMA to cover any bills, but I monitor this pretty carefully anyway, especially after scheduling the Elan payment. If the CMA balance drops below a predetermined threshold, I do a special transfer from Ally.

 

[Scuba]

I pay the Elan bill by manually having Elan pull the money from the bank when I schedule the payment. I want to review all transactions and insure there is more than enough money in the checking account before the bill is paid.

+1

 

[bingybear]

Thanks for the replies. Cobra, at this time I have no income from pensions or SS. Your method sounds great for those with income. I let bill pay pull from a brokerage account as needed and try to keep the brokerage account with enough to cover expenses. I sometimes need to pull money from external accounts to top off the brokerage account... maybe once or twice a year. In general I don't tend to do much with bank accounts, except one online bank where I have some CDs and some high yield savings. I kind of ignore these accounts, but expect I will be using these to top off my brokerage account that backs up bill pay.



Audreyh1, I used that link to pay my first CC bill with the new credit card. I then set it up in bill pay and just populate the bill pay as I do with other bills that don't provide an ebill. This does avoid an issue with not enough $ in cash management.

kimcdougc - I do have an external checking account that I use to write the few manual checks I may need to do in a year. I also use it as a place to cash incoming checks to me and to get cash locally. I really want to avoid using this as a place to pay a monthly bill as I would have to manually top off that account every month. It also pay 0% interest.

As with others I use my fido card for most of my expenses. I use a couple of other cards when they have 5% rebate offers.

It took me a while to use ebill. I have come to like it. I get an email when the bill comes. This allows me time to check that bill is accurate. Bills like my natural gas bill I don't really need to look at as the $ amount is in the notification email. As long as it is near expected value, I don't look at it. Bill pay then schedules these payments per the parameters I defined. I can check the bill and alter the bill pay if there are issues.