Why We Avoid Paying Our Bills (And How To Fix It)

June 19, 2018

There it is. The dreaded stack of unpaid bills. The “I’ll get to that later” pile. The pile that occupies a prominent spot on my desk so it can grab my attention, yet it still sits there unpaid day after day pile.

You’re not alone

If you also have a pile like this, you’re in good company. I’m an experienced Certified Financial Planner™ professional, and I have one, too.

That doesn’t get either one of us off the hook, however. The bills still need to be paid; we both know that. Otherwise, ugly things begin to happen to our credit scores and the phone begins to ring with urgent calls from strangers demanding money. We both know that, too.

Miscellaneous bills are my kryptonite

In my own defense, these are “miscellaneous” bills. Oddities that occur sometimes, like the occasional medical co-pay from that dermatologist visit a couple of months ago. Or the bill for that awesome discount I got by subscribing to Florida Sportsman and checking the “bill me later” box. Or my annual Certified Financial Planner™ credentials renewal fee.

The critical bills however, those that take care of life’s necessities — food, shelter, clothing, transportation, insurance, and debt payments – those are set up on electronic bill pay with my credit union so they are paid like clockwork every payday and never missed. I find that putting as much of my financial life on autopilot as possible avoids quite a few financial stressors.

Why do we put off paying bills?

As an informal yet long time student of human behavior, I often ask myself why we sometimes let our unpaid bills stack up? Why don’t we just pick up the check book (or fire up the bill pay app on our smart phones) and pay the silly things? There are a few obvious reasons:

Something more urgent (or enjoyable) demands our attention or our money or both.
It’s an out-of-the-ordinary expense, and we will have to break from our usual routine to pay it.
We don’t have the cash to cover it just yet (this is a biggie; I’ll cover it in a future blog post).

There are also some not-so-obvious reasons too

Some psychologists suggest that humans may be predisposed to naturally avoid unpleasant experiences. For example, our hunter/gatherer ancestors were served quite well by their instinctive avoidance of unpleasant experiences, such as poisonous reptiles, animals with large claws and teeth, and fellow humans sporting angry facial expressions and spears.

Unfortunately, our brain development hasn’t yet caught up to the modern world, and it still tells us to avoid some unpleasantries that we really should stare in the face, grab by the ears, and deal with right away. Like that pile of unpaid bills. In the deepest recesses of our brains, however, we react to that bill the same way our ancestors reacted to rattlesnakes – Put that down! Stay away!

Is it just your money beliefs rearing up again?

Like everything else in our lives, our budgets, bills, and retirement balances are driven by the choices and actions we choose or fail to choose. Dr. Bradley Klontz and several of his colleagues have conducted extensive research into the various beliefs people hold about money and how it affects their behavior. In Are Your Money Beliefs Holding You Back?, my colleague Dr. Scott Spann summarizes many of Dr. Klontz’s findings and discusses how we can go about modifying our long held money beliefs and train them to work for us rather than against us.

Or is it a budgeting issue?

The central issue is often a budget that is out of whack. You do have a budget, right? No? Again, you have plenty of company. We talk to people almost every day about budgets. One of my other colleagues, Tania Brown, shares some great budgeting tips in Why Your Budget is Failing and How to Fix It.

Baby steps to get the bills paid

Even though it might feel as if your financial world is not as good as it could be, things are rarely as unpleasant as our minds lead us to believe. A sense of perspective and some baby steps along the way can help us adjust our perspective and get back on track.

Psychologists remind us that a good way to overcome this type of avoidance behavior is to break it down into smaller pieces:

Day 1) open the envelope.
Day 2) Take out the bill and look at it.
Day 3) Pay the bill, then congratulate yourself and celebrate your success.

As comedic actor Bill Murray reminds us in What About Bob with baby steps, we can do anything. It sounds a little silly. It looks way too simple. And it really works.

Take it one at a time

There’s no rush to change all of our money habits all at once. Pick one and work on that one for a while. Give yourself permission to take some baby steps.

Now, if you’ll excuse me for a bit, I have some unpaid bills I need to open.