Pay bills with a credit card?
Use creditcards.com to find a decent card. I’m getting 5% cash back on my purchases (from grocery and gas) and 1% on everything else. I pay off my balance each month so life is good.
(Brainstorming worst cases here): Say you have it set up with the utilities that they automatically charge your credit card when they issue their bills (most offer this, now). Say also that you have one mother of a February in which it is -45 degrees all month which keeps you inside so you order a pay-per-view movie every night. Your utility bills are WAY out of the ordinary and you go over your limit. That’d be bad.
I’ll second ikkyu2 on difficulties stopping companies from taking money out of your account. I used to work in a credit card centre for a bank & surprisingly often people would assume they could stop payments just by cancelling their card & getting a new one. Not so. The withdrawals just flow on to the new account. Typically, though, the companies are actually entitled to continue with the withdrawals, as the customers were under a contractual obligation to pay; I am not suggesting that the companies were necessarily behaving dishonestly. Nevertheless, if you want to get out of an arrangement with a company, it is much easier to withhold a cheque than to get your card details out of their system.
