If you’re a Michigan consumer who’s bad at keeping up with due dates, automatic bill payment with a debit or credit card can be a good strategy. Having your recurring expenses automatically paid can also save time and money spent on stamps. If you sign up for automatic payments, it’s a good idea to plan your budget accordingly. It’s also helpful to keep up with the expiration dates on the debit or credit cards that you’re using. Finally, you should have a recovery plan ready if one of your cards is ever hacked.
Should Michigan Consumers Opt for Debit Cards or Credit Cards for Automatic Bill Payment?
For any Michigander who has a credit card with a good rewards program, paying bills on this card makes sense. After all, paying for your power and gas are necessary expenses, so you might as well be earning rewards too. Make sure you’re able to pay off the balance every month on the card setup with automatic bill payment. You don’t want to end up owing interest charges on your $87 Consumers Energy bill.
When using automatic bill payment with a credit card, it’s helpful to have a card dedicated to just the bills. Also, it’s much more convenient to only have to keep tabs on one bill-paying credit card. Eventually, all credit cards expire. When this happens, you’ll be responsible for updating your payment information. If you don’t do this, you could miss payments and accidentally hurt your credit score. There’s also the possibility that one or more of your credit cards might become stolen. If this happens, it will be much easier to recover theft for only one card rather than two or more.
Security issues aside, setting up automatic payments through your debit card means that you’ll never have to worry about building debt. It’s just like writing a check to pay a bill. Only the money comes out instantly when the due date rolls around. For this reason, it’s important to manage your budget when using a debit card setup with automatic bill payment. If you forget that a payment is about to go through, depending on your bank, one of two things can happen. Either the payment becomes rejected due to lack of funds and you’ll miss a due date, or you’ll overdraft your checking account and incur late fees.
Why Michigan Consumers Should Always be on Guard against the Threat of Identity Theft
Using debit and credit cards to pay bills can be convenient, but it can also leave you vulnerable to identity theft. In spite of ongoing efforts to keep consumers safe, identity thieves are still very active in Michigan. So you should take measures to protect your accounts and personal information.
If you have instant access to your checking and savings accounts, you should check your statements daily for signs of suspicious activity. It’s also important to monitor your credit reports. You can do this for free by going to www.annualcreditreport.com and requesting copies of your credit report from each of the major credit bureaus. Under the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act (FACTA), you have the right to make these requests every twelve months.
If you see accounts that you don’t recognize on one or more of your credit reports, you may have been the victim of identity theft. Other inaccuracies that you might spot could be the results of credit reporting errors, which are more common than you may think. Either way, any errors that you find on your credit reports should be disputed and removed. Luckily, if you’re a Michigan resident, you’re not on your own when it comes to cleaning up your credit reports. You can get a FREE lawyer to help you through the entire process.
The Free and Legal way to Get Better Credit
Don’t let errors on your credit reports bring your credit score down. At Credit Repair Lawyers of America, we’ve been cleaning up credit reports for consumers since 2008 for free. How do we do it? All of our fees come from the defendants on settled cases. This is why our clients pay nothing for the work we do.
Let’s start the conversation about what we can do for your credit. Set up your free consultation today by calling Attorney Gary Nitzkin at (248)353-2882 or sending him a message through our contact page. Sue. Settle. Smile.
