How I Used Mint Bills to Finally Make Paying My Bills Easier
Accounts suck. As if taking all your money away wasn’t enough, it’s a nightmare to organize and remember. However, after I started using Mint Bills, it became much easier to keep track of my bills.
I have to admit: I don’t actually use Mint that much. While Lifehacker is one of the top tips for budgeting software , I’ve never found it useful for anything more than checking my credit rating periodically or looking at where my auto loan balance is. On the other hand, Mint Bills is a separate app from Mint and is available in web, iOS and Android versions. It lets you connect to a variety of billing companies, creates a calendar for due dates, and even lets you pay bills right from the app. Even if you’re a big fan of Mint itself, Mint Bills offers a ton of features that can help you manage your various payments.
Problem: account management is a mess
Paying bills is one of an adult’s worst nightmares. Between rent, gas, electricity, cell phones, credit cards, car payments, and a host of other expenses, it can be difficult to keep track of who you owe what to. At Lifehacker, we’ve talked a lot about how to automate your invoices , but the companies that manage your invoices often don’t work with you. Here are just a few of the problems I’ve faced over the years:
- Invoices That Don’t Support Automatic Payments: It seems crazy that the invoice provider won’t let you set up automatic charges for your account, but many don’t. I’ve seen sites that don’t offer automatic payments at all, or (oddly enough) only offer the ability to schedule one payment in advance. The latter was always the worst since I forgot which month I had already scheduled the payment.
- Ugly Bill Paying Sites: If you’ve ever used a bill payment site operated by your local government, you’ve probably run into some ridiculous browser restrictions, login issues, or worst of all, inconvenient downtime when you need to pay a bill. The latter often results in people forgetting to come back later when the site is up, which inevitably leads to late fees.
- Unreliable payment schedules: Even if the invoice does not support automatic payment, I can still receive a check in the mail, right? The problem is, it shifts my effective due date. Even if my bank automatically sends a check, money will usually be withdrawn from my account a week earlier, so I need to take that into account. So, some of my invoices show exact due dates, but others need to be adjusted. This made the pursuit of deadlines an organizational mess.
If all your bills support automatic payment, you always have enough money in your account to cover any bills at any time, and all the companies you do business with are honest and reliable about how much they charge from your account. account management can be excellent. However, if even one gear doesn’t work, things can quickly go bad. I have often found myself in this situation. Spreadsheets, calendars, and the mint didn’t solve my problem of figuring out when to pay bills so I don’t overspend my bill. Mint Bills, on the other hand, did.
Solution: Mint Bills connects directly to most bills of exchange
The main reason Mint is useful is because it connects directly to all of your accounts. Mint Bills takes the same approach to your bills. Rather than just reminding you that your bills exist, the app allows you to connect directly to your bills (if supported) and pay bills directly from a single app. If a specific account is not supported, you can add information about it to receive reminders and place it on your calendar with the rest.
This method has several advantages that most of the other methods I have used do not:
- Built-in calendar: the biggest problem with the accounts – it is not aware of the fact that they exist. This is when they should. Mint Bills natively offers a calendar view of due dates, so you can see when each bill is due.
- Pay multiple bills from the same app: If Mint had the ability to pay bills directly, I could have started using it much earlier. If your bill can be integrated with Mint Bills, you can pay directly from the app. Even if half of your bills can be paid this way, it will be a huge burden.
- Credit Usage and Other Tracking Tools: This wouldn’t be Mint if it wasn’t for some sort of data tracking. In Mint Bills, you can see information about the use of credit, available credit and bank balances for the various connected accounts.
Not perfect, of course. There are some accounts that I still can’t connect directly to Mint Bills because no one updates their systems slower than the companies that handle your money. However, Mint Bills has a mechanism for this. You can add a “manual invoice” that allows you to specify how much and when you need to pay. It is then added to your billing calendar and you will receive periodic notifications so you know when your due date is approaching.
So far, Mint Bills isn’t perfect, but for me it’s finally the psychological distinction I need between “bills” and “everything else.” Every budget I’ve ever made considers recurring bills a separate expense from, say, going out to a restaurant. Due to the timing of payments, late fees, and inconsistencies between different companies on how you can pay, managing my accounts has been the most confusing part of my financial life. I’ve never been a huge fan of the regular Mint app, but Mint Bills really makes sense to me.