Ask HN: Personal Assistant as a service recommendation

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8865553

by ravenkat • 12 years ago

6 5 12 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I'm fed up with my monthly chores like paying credit card bills on time, gas, electric, car loans, mortgage all these bills. I miss to pay some time and it affects my credit score.

Do you guys know any trusted startup who provides personal assistant as a service. I don't want them to manage my calendar but pay all my bills and expenses and generate expense report monthly.

I'm ready to pay $50-$100 every month if somebody provides this service. I don't want to have an agent whom i have to call and discuss about this but a trusted app which will do this for me.

walterbell• 12 years ago

Are you willing to run a "home server" to support this functionality?

Without a trusted/secure appliance in your home, you would need to delegate spending authority to another legal entity, which would then need access to your banking passwords. That's a lot of risk for consumers to accept, and potential liability for a service provider (e.g. if they are hacked and money is directed elsewhere).

The trusted device would still need to contact a central server for open data that assists in scraping/archiving/parsing your bills from every possible utility/bank/vendor, but the execution of payment could happen locally and be controlled by you.

Many banks can automatically pay bills, but they don't usually support complex logic to "audit" a bill before payment.

mtmail• 12 years ago

As a European I'm puzzled this is still an issue. All the companies you mention ask me for my bank account details pro-actively and then debit my account (at no extra cost).

davismwfl2• 12 years ago

Its mostly the same here in the States, but some of the companies will charge you for the privilege of them taking your money via an ACH transaction. Sadly/strangely those that charge are many times the bigger banks.

davismwfl2• 12 years ago

If you aren't having cash flow issues, then just setup auto payments. Most companies do auto ACH for no charge, and even some offer a discount for it. My car loan company gave me a lower interest rate to do the auto ACH, not that it made that big of a difference but a quarter of a point was still nice.

If you have cash flow issues sometimes, then setup the base ones you can on the auto ACH, and others set on a calendar reminder. My bank lets me schedule the payments but then it reminds me before they come due so I can either adjust them or let them stand. I love that cause it makes it easy to work with those times when there is a cash flow crunch and I have to move a payment out a little or something.

One other point, to protect my credit, I have my credit cards (all 2 of them), setup to make at least the minimum payment + $25 just so I can't fuck up and miss them. I did that when I was younger a few times and man it sucks. But if I want to pay more then I just log in and make an "extra" payment which makes life easy.

Last thing, I don't do it, but I have a friend that has a specific account that he puts only X dollars in each month through his paycheck deposit. So X goes into that account and the remainder goes into his main account (almost every payroll department supports split deposits). He then has all the auto payments come out of the one account where he puts the X dollars into. He likes this because if one of the vendors has something hacked his risk is limited to only what was in that account, plus he never has to think about those payments. Just another idea for those worried about vendors having their primary account information, personally it makes sense to me I just have been too lazy to set that up.

jf22• 12 years ago

Just pay your bills man.

How can people not manage to pay ~12 bills a month?

And like an expense report for 12 bills? You don't know how much your fixed costs are?

Seriously I just don't understand why this is such a problem for some people. On the 15th of every month I pay everything and then write down what I paid and adjust my budget spreadsheet.

This whole process takes 2 hours and I play 2 games of hearthstone or watch the latest episode of walking dead at the same time.

Ask HN: Personal Assistant as a service recommendation

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