Full-Balance Auto-Pay: The Holy Grail of Credit Cards
Imagine if your credit cards were paid in full every month automatically, and you never accrued any interest.
Credit cards can be amazing tools. They offer travel rewards, discounts, hotel deals, cash back—and it all adds up over time. But, there’s a catch: credit card companies often make it easy to forget you’re spending real money. They create a sense that their money is “yours” and that repayment will be easy. This disconnect can lead to overspending and the accumulation of debt.
In this post, we explain how using Spend as your credit card accountability buddy will enable you to pay down outstanding debt and achieve the holy grail of credit cards: paying every statement in full, every month, automatically. All the rewards with none of the interest and none of the stress.
The Tap Trap
It’s tempting to tap to pay without knowing what you can afford. “I’ll pay it back eventually,” is the thinking and that’s exactly what credit card companies want. They make billions on balances that carry over and accrue interest, to the tune of $1.21 trillion of debt for the entire U.S. in 2024.
Some other budget systems recommend only carrying and spending cash because you can’t spend money you don’t have. But credit cards let you spend money whether you have the cash or not. This problem is often further exacerbated by balances being split across multiple accounts at different institutions.
In order to know how much you can put on your credit cards so you can confidently and consistently pay them off in full each month, many money nerds (ourselves included) turn to spreadsheets. They’re difficult to set up and even harder to maintain.
Spend offers a better way.
Know Your Limits
Once you securely link your accounts, Spend automatically calculates the difference between your income and expenses to calculate a weekly allowance called Safe to Spend. When you buy something on a credit card, Spend sets part of your income aside to ensure you can cover that payment. So long as your Safe to Spend is positive, it’s always possible to pay off your credit cards in full.
Since your Safe to Spend reflects all your financial activity across all your accounts in near real-time, you can make spending decisions with full awareness of your current financial state, while always being able to cover any new credit card spending. This awareness makes you more likely to make responsible choices, thinking twice before an impulse buy, knowing it will directly impact your overall Safe to Spend.
The Power of Healthy Debt
Talk to any wealthy person or financial advisor, and they will tell you that healthy debt is the key to generating wealth. Conversely, bad debt is a one of the many reasons that people stay poor.
Knowing how to cover your debt obligations unlocks a world of credit card hacks and also lays the foundation for more advanced forms of borrowing like home equity or margin lines of credit. Simply using a credit card for spending can provide you with free flights, upgrades, cash back, buyer protections, insurance coverage, etc. In the U.S., having a high credit score is a rite of passage to accessing more debt, which can unlock hundreds of thousands of dollars in wealth. But, to make sure that you’re the one getting richer and not the banks, you need to be sure you can always cover the debt obligations.
Once you’re spending within your income limits and not within your credit limits, and you’ve paid all of your credit card balances in full (which Spend Goals can also help with), you can enable full balance auto-pay and never worry about accruing interest and manually paying a credit card bill ever again.
With this and transaction search, Spend makes it possible to never open your credit card app again.
This is a major reason why we’re building Spend. We want you to be able to spend with confidence and without stress. Being able to auto-pay your credit cards in full every month gets you one step closer.
Written by Morgan, co-founder