Paying your credit card on time

Posted by Nick Niesen on October 29th, 2010

One of the most common ways to get a penalty charge from your credit card company is if you fail to pay your credit card monthly statement on time. Therefore, if you are finding that you are being charged with a lot of penalty charges on your card or cards, one of the first things you will need to start doing is making sure your card statement is paid on time each month.

Some people are naturally more organised than others. This will never change. Some of us are able to say with safety that every month we sit down with our checkbook and balance it, pay all our bills, write all the checks and have everything in order. Others of us however, are a little more haphazard than this. We pay bills as they arrive, or put them somewhere we feel they are safe and hope we don?t forget about them, like on the kitchen fridge, and then when we get a chance or feel in the mood, we pay the bill off.

One of the best ways to pay your credit card bill, and one of the surest ways to make sure you are no longer slapped with unwelcome late fees and charges, is to arrange with your bank to have the bill payed automatically each month by direct debit or standing order. This way you can be sure that the bill will always be paid. Of course, what you will have to do is make sure that you have enough money in your bank account each months so that your bank does not allow the credit card company to leave you high and dry with out enough money to pay off all your other bills. What?s worse, what actually could happen is that the credit card bill is for even more than you have available in your account so that your account becomes over drawn and your bank charges you a penalty for this.

If you are not confident that you will have enough money in your bank account each month to pay the entire bill in full, another option is to instruct the credit card company that you only wish to pay the minimum amount each month. While this means that you are more likely to have enough funds in your account to cover the payment, it also means that you will pay a lot of interest on your balance and it will take a very long time to clear your debt.

Probably the best compromise is to pay a set amount each month that, while more than the minimum payment, is still not so high that you will be left short for your other payments.