Arlo and Janis by Jimmy Johnson for May 20, 2022

Top billing

Someone forget to pay the bill, Arlo?

I am Arlo, and Janis is my bride. She handles all the finances and I can honestly say I haven’t paid a bill since sometime in the last century. Hell, I’ve hardly even touched one.

Did Arlo just declare himself a sovereign nation? Easiest way I know of to not pay your bills.

Be sure to make lists of all your auto draft, eBills, and credit card auto pays. Still trying to settle a friends estate and cancel all these. Right now my opinion these are the work of the devil.

Hey Arlo, I ‘ve got some paper bills you can have. I’ve been paying my own bills since I was 19…that’s 41 years.

Still get some paper, but I’m being forced more and more to blind pay things. I still do an audit at the end of the month to keep track of what’s going where. I’m not getting trapped paying overdraft charges. $38 Billion in overdraft fees collected last year or the year before. People just spend and not pay any attention to what they have.

I recall when we used to get utility bills back in the 70s… your info and what you owed were on those punchcards. The FUTURE! ;-)

I get one paper bill. The trash collection and it’s on alternate months. Tried email, but never got the bills, just reminders that I hadn’t paid the bill; so back to paper.

Oh just sit there are and just sit!

My wife organizes all the autopays and the CC payed bills for loyalty points. the accounting is on her laptop and the cloud. Relax, no one in Russia cares about my finances. We both access the one bank account and once a month I pay the CC bills after we have gone over them. I have one CC I use for online business because i can check it every day easily if i wish. I do check it once a week.

Our water bill is paper. I have to take the most recent one to the dump when I have a load of trash to dump, or I have to pay the out-of-town fee instead of dumping free.

I handle the bank accounts, hubs just tells me if he wants to buy something. Don’t have credit cards, we use AfterPay and sometimes Paypal 4 in 1, which debit automatically. I pay the Afterpay bills every fortnight though, which works out well :)

autopay

Some jokes fly right over the head.

You still have to watch out for scammers – they make their ad look like a bill that ‘urgently’ needs to be paid.

This is my wife and me!

Don’t think she cares Arlo

I do all the bill paying, because I like doing that sort of stuff (numbers, organization, etc.), but I keep my wife fully informed on everything and she knows what and where everything is. I prefer paying bills by check and by mail, as I feel I have more direct control over it, but unfortunately too often a payment gets waylaid in the mail somewhere and the payee gets it a week or two late (and I’m stuck with a late fee or being forced to do an on-line payment). I will do some on-line payments, especially when forced to by the common occurrence of a paper bill arriving less than a week before payment is due (I think some companies do that on purpose, to force on-line payments). But I will not do Autopay (you know, personal control and all that).

The reason we have everything we have is because my wife takes care of the money. If I took care of the bills we’d be living in cardboard boxes

I am an accountant – daughter of 2 accountants and one grandmother was a bookkeeper. I have paid all our bills since before we were married – I would go to his house (he lived with his parents) and pay his bills for him before we were married. (We dated for about 6 years before marrying and have been married over 40 years.)

We get paper bills for almost everything and I pay them by check. The 3 or 4 bills that we cannot get on paper (or that give good sized discounts for autobilling) come to a credit card that we have for this and anything we NEED to order online. It has a US$1000 credit limit and is only used for this sort of thing – and I pay the paper bill that comes for it with a check.

We also get all of our bank statements on paper.

This applies to us, our businesses, and the 2 clubs of which I am treasurer.

I have worked with computers since I first learned to program in Fortran in 1971 and the one thing that was emphasized in every computer class I took was “it is not a question if the computer will be hacked – but when”. Our computer data is not kept on the hard drive of our computers, the computers are shut down and unplugged when not in use and only the needed flash drive is in the computer at any time.

The few accounting clients I still have (semi-retired) also pay all of their bills by check and get paper statements. I do their taxes with software which is downloaded to my computer and their data is only on my computer (again on removable flash drive).