One thing I would add about due dates is that since they tend to fall on the same day of the month, they will sometimes fall on weekends or holidays. In the bad old days, it was up to you to make sure the payment got there on the last business day before the holidays. If you were unfortunate enough to have a due date on a Monday holiday, it would have had to get there the Friday beforehand.
When the CFPB was formed, it was able to institute a rule that said that when the due date fell on a day when the bank wasn’t open for processing payments (or a mail holiday), then the payment would still be considered on time if it came in by 5 PM of the next business day.
Still, you do not want to rely on banks getting regulations right, so if you send payments to them, be aware of getting the payment to them at a time they are open, before the due date.
If you set up an auto-pay on the credit card bank’s website, they will generally consider the payment on time, even if it’s scheduled for the weekend. But if you do that, please make sure you look at your statement monthly. If someone makes a fraudulent charge, you only get so long to contest it, and “my bill was on auto pay so I didn’t look at the statement” is not a valid excuse.
I’m glad you like them! I’ve been trying to do a weekly cadence (second so far), but I’ll post a little more often as I see other posts so we can have a good variety for discussion.
“I didn’t look at the statement” is not a valid excuse
Yup. We have several cards, so we use a service that aggregates our transactions across cards. I also have alerts on all that support it set to something a bit higher than my normal transactions.
But at the end of the day, it is on you to detect and report fraud. They’re usually proactive about it, but I have had cases where I caught something before the credit company did (in one case, I had already contacted the merchant when I noticed it was pending to try to prevent it from being shipped).