Originally Posted by
Happy
I understand MANY like AutoPay but most do not realize when AutoPay went wrong, it could go VERY WRONG. We have Zero AutoPay set up for any of our accounts - from credit cards to utilities - after suffered from a bad consequence Decades ago, (long before blogs and such), I swore never use AutoPay again.
What people should do is to set up ALERT in all your card accounts, to get an ALERT reminder on the date that there are X days before the payment is due. I set ours to 10 days - though by the time I got the Alerts I usually have already set up payments on the cards sites - my habit is to set up payments as soon as statements are closed, but the payments usually are a week before due date, so a future payment scheduled.
AutoPay can create a FALSE sense of Safety and that when it fails, the fall out is always UGLY.
I pay every card manually (utilities get auto-paid). But I still have auto-pay set up to pay the minimum amount on the day the payment is due, as a safety net. One of the downsides of optimizing credit card use and reads is that I have a dozen cards. Not all will have a charge every month, but on average six or seven will have a balance due every month. I review the charges on a regular basis and manually schedule payments when the statement closes (I have a spreadsheet to track this). The safety net of auto-pay is for the case where I am unable to manually pay, e.g., if I get hit by a bus and end up in a coma for a month. I don’t want my wife to have to deal with my credit card scheme, especially not in that circumstance, so it’s auto-pilot time to “keep the plane in the air” while I am recovering. At a cost, of course, because minimum payment means interest, but I accept that risk.
The scenario the OP encountered seems fairly unusual (I rarely return something and very rarely have a credit balance). And it seems like a Chase bug they should be willing to fix.