If you are still choosing to get your credit card bills via snail mail, you may have noticed that you don’t always get a whole lot of warning before the credit card bill is due. In some cases, you might have less than two weeks from the day you receive the statement before it has to be paid. If you get paid every two weeks and are hit with the bill at the wrong time, you might find that it impossible to make the payment on time.
Unfortunately, there isn’t a whole lot you can do about receiving a bill with such short notice, but making sure that your credit card bills get paid on time is a concern for anyone concerned about preserving their credit histories. While the federal Fair Credit Billing Act does require credit card issuers to send the bill at least two weeks before it’s due, that doesn’t mean that you’ll actually receive the statement two weeks prior to it being due. After all, when the bill is sent, it can take a few days before it finally arrives in your mailbox.
Due to the fact mail can be SLOW at times, many people are choosing to receive their statements and pay their bills online. Not only does this help prevent the possibility of getting the bill with too little time left before it has to be paid, it’s also cheaper and more environmentally friendly. After all, you don’t have to pay for postage and, since you are more likely to get the bill paid on time, you don’t have to worry about late fees potentially costing you even more money.
Personally, I prefer to conduct all of my credit card business online. By setting up an online account, I can check the status of my credit cards whenever I want – which includes seeing when a bill is due. In addition, I sign up for email alerts that notify me when a bill is due. With many cards, you can even sign up for reminders that will be sent out as your due date draws closer if a payment has not been received yet.
Some card issuers will allow you to pick the due date for payment to be made but even those card issuers that do give you that flexibility will still expect payment to be made prior to the due date every month.
You should make a note of when each of your credit card bills are due for budgeting purposes. So as you budget out all of your monthly payments, you give yourself an opportunity to plan for those inevitably staggered credit card payments.
Regardless of how you do it, anticipating the due dates ahead of time and planning your payments accordingly is the key to success.
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