Why does American pay their bill?

37 comments

1. What bill?

2. I don’t even know Bill.

3. We have auto pay here too, all my bills are on auto pay.

4. Your premise is flawed. Autopay is also very common here.

5. I was too young to pay taxes during the Bill Clinton administration.

6. >why do you have to manually pay your bill?

   You don’t have to if you don’t want to.

   >Almost everyone in my country do it with monthly automatic transfer from our bank account.

   We paid other stuff either “from the spot” by card or we use check for the rest.

   Same here

7. Most all of my bills are automatically scheduled. Some I do not have auto scheduled as they are variable and I want to see them before the money leaves.

   I have no idea why you would think we don’t have this at all… I feel like this is one of those, we call getting paid “receiving our paycheck” but I have been receiving my pay via direct deposit into my bank account since I entered the workforce in 1996…

8. We do?

9. Where’d you hear this? Automatic payments are extremely common here.

10. Where is “my country”?

11. Every bill I have is on autopay. There’s some I never pay attention to. They’re just always getting paid.

12. >Almost everyone in my country do it with monthly automatic transfer from our bank account.

    This is also how it is in the USA

13. What do you think it means to “manually pay a bill”? Why do you think we do that?

14. Some of my bills are on auto pay but not all them just in case I need to ask for a bill to be pushed back a month due to unforeseen circumstances

15. All my bills are auto-pay dude, WTF are you talking about?

16. I have literally one bill that I pay manually. This post actually reminded me to go pay it lol.

17. A lot of places don’t offer automatic bill pay. So.e don’t even take credit cards

18. If I don’t pay my bills then my electricity gets shut off.

19. Not sure what you’re saying. I don’t have one bill that I have to pay manually every month.

20. Since I don’t have a physical bank. Occasionally I’ll just add money to my account for say my water bill, or my internet I’ll just hand over some cash and get a credit on my account. All of my bills are paid automatically.

21. Autopay is available for many billers.

    However, I don’t autopay credit cards. Paying off a credit card when there’s a fraudulent charge involved may be seen as accepting responsibility for it.

22. Autopay via bank draft is very common. Those who don’t use it are generally choosing not to.

23. is there some rogue American traveling the word telling everyone that Americans pay for things in the weirdest imaginable ways? what is going on

24. Idk where you got the idea that we don’t have autopay in the US, but your information is false. I literally pay every single one of my bills through autopay. All of them.

25. You still use checks?

    Our garbage company sends us a bill every three months. It is the only bill we can’t schedule automatically or just pay online. Besides that we haven’t paid bills in person since the early 2000’s.

26. The US banking system, for some reason still likes paper checks. European and Asian banks got rid of paper checks 10-20 years ago. I can only assume that US banks still support the paper check system for $$$.

27. What? We’ve had automatic payments for years. Where did you get this idea from?

28. You don’t have to. It’s an option sone people choose. All of my bills have been automated for more than a decade.

29. Not sure why you would think that Americans don’t have autopay.

    Maybe if you should get past the ridiculous superiority complex and think for a microsecond before posting a silly question like this

30. All of my bills are on autopay either from my bank account or from a credit card. (I have a credit card that earns points, so I put my monthly bills on it and pay it off every month.)

31. Auto pay is super common, but I personally don’t trust it.

32. do I have to manually pay my bill? I feel like my electric and water providers would have come after me by now if that’s the case, since I haven’t manually paid those bills since shortly after I moved in

33. How, in your imagination, do Americans pay bills?

    I’m sincerely curious. Do you think we, like, walk to the power plant with a briefcase full of cash to pay our electric bills?

34. Cite your sources. Automatic bill pay is extremely common in the United States.

35. Because you’re watching TV shows from the 90s

36. I really want to know the motivation for asking this.

37. As everyone else has said we have automatic payments. I have all of my payments except my car and phone on automatic payments and those two are just personal preference as they are my biggest bills and have grace periods.

    I gotta know where did you get this idea we don’t have autopay from?