Back in 2017, my 86-year-old dad (who lives alone, his-wife/my-mom passed away over 20 years ago) fell and required hip replacement surgery. He was suddenly and unexpectedly away from home for about 3 weeks, either in the hospital or in a rehab center.
I had to scramble to make sure his bills got paid. While I was at it, I set up autopay for most of his routine monthly bills such as electric, gas, and cable/internet/phone. This made his bill paying easier for the next several years, and it would be useful should be ever end up sidelined like that again.
Fast forward to last April, when he needed his other hip replaced. Unlike in 2017, this was planned, so he made sure to pay any of his other non-auto-pay bills in advance. Autopay would handle the rest, or so I thought.
While laid up, I was reviewing his mail and his bills, including the autopay ones, and found that one of them (his gas bill) had a large outstanding balance even though he was on a monthly budget plan which withdrew the same small amount from his bank account for 12 months until the gas company reconciled the difference around September. After I returned home, I found the online account I had set up in 2017 and saw that they had failed to take any money from his bank for about 9 months! He never noticed this in his bills because he never paid any further attention to them after I had setup the autopay.
I called the gas company to ask why they stopped taking money out and they told me they emailed him to let him know the autopay feature had an expiration date around September of 2020. Some time in 2018 he had stopped using the email address I used to set up his account, so he never checked it (he has a different one now). I still had the login info for it so I checked it out and found it among the hundreds of unread ones (mostly junk). It's not like he uses his email often anyway.
But I also saw in the online profile that I could use a different email address for login purposes from the one used to receive emails. So, I switched the latter to my email in case any emails like those appear again. I get confirmations of his monthly bills getting paid, which is fine.
I guess complacency can sometimes result from making things too easy.