BillFloat: Get more time to pay bills

If you’re one of the 61% of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck then you might want to look over billfloat.com, a business that provides small dollar loans to extend due bills for a month.

In these tough financial times with high credit interest and late payment fees providing billions of dollars of income to lenders, billfloat.com boasts that consumers can pay 15 times less interest a month by using their service. As an alternative to the many payday loan companies out there, billfloat.com has a simple application process, boasts fast approval, and has a straightforward and clear charging model.

If you’re a first time user of the service then you can extend or “float” a bill for up to $225. This amount can rise to $1,000 after a few successful transactions.  After opening an on-line account you just tell billfloat who you want to pay, the date the payment is due and the amount. If you’re approved you’ll get confirmation by way of a transaction summary detailing the original bill amount, payment date, service fee and total amount to repay.

Interest of 3% a month is charged on the amount which equates to 36% APR. It must be remembered however that these are short-term loans and must be repaid in 30 days. Failure to do so will result in inevitable late payment fees. Only one bill can be “floated” at any one time.

The service supports around 3,500 billers including telecommunications, utility, healthcare and financial services companies and many of these have a link to billfloat.com on their own website as a payment option for customers feeling the squeeze.

All good so far and clearly a user friendly method of bridging a short-term financial gap and avoiding associated late fees and negative credit score issues. Users concerned about security and disclosing personal banking data however, might feel a little uncomfortable.

When opening your account you will need to provide bank account details, including user name and password, in order for billfloat to schedule your automatic repayment. Despite security and encryption levels being as high as most banks and financial institutions this is clearly not information that everyone is going to feel happy giving out.

Like with any transaction involving personal financial details, anyone considering using billfloat should have a look around the web and see what existing users are saying about the service. Having said that the business has some fairly heavyweight backing including PayPay, Venrock and First Round Capital which must say something for its integrity.

Conclusion
Used wisely this looks like a decent enough way of overcoming the occasional blip in your cashflow. If you’re constantly guilty of poor financial management however it may become habit forming, albeit at a cheaper price than some alternatives.