Your Bills: Pay Them or Defer Them?
Many of you are facing difficult financial decisions as your hours are reduced, you have to take an unpaid leave of absence or you are laid off. At the same time, some creditors are offering to help you by waiving or deferring payments. In this post, I’ll provide my thoughts on how you might decide whether to pay or defer your bills.
Key Takeaways: Pay or Defer Your Bills
Here are the key takeaways about whether to pay or defer your bills.
If a creditor is willing to waive some or all of your debt, accept the offer.
When creditors are willing to defer payments without any extra charges, accepting that offer, rather than paying from your emergency savings, is likely to make sense for most people. The same holds true when the extra interest or late fees are small.
The only situations in which dipping into your emergency savings is preferable for most people are those in which the fees or extra interest are expensive.
If you are unable to make your payments on time, whether they are from your income or emergency savings, it is very important to contact your creditors. If you do, you are less likely to incur fees and it is less likely that there will be an adverse impact on your credit score.
What are Debtholders Offering?
Before deciding whether to pay or defer your bills, you’ll want to make sure you understand what is being offered. There are generally three types of offers made by creditors:
Eliminate some or all of your debt.
Defer payments without extra interest or fees.
Defer payments with extra interest or fees.
I explain and provide examples of each of these three options.
Waive Some Payments or Forgive Debt
Under this option, the creditor forgives some or all of your debt. Debt can be forgiven by waiving (eliminating) some of your payments or reducing each of your payments. If all of your debt is forgiven, you will not need to make any more payments.
Clearly, you will want to accept offers from any creditors that are willing to forgive some or all of your debt. If only a portion of the debt is forgiven, you’ll want to make sure that you understand how that portion will be reflected in your payments.
Will you have to continue making payments as in the past, but with fewer payments?
Are you able to stop making payments for a certain period of time?
Will you have to continue making payments as in the past, but with a smaller amount?
As an example, I have seen several proposals from US Senate Democrats ranging from wiping out all education debt to cancelling between $10,000 and $50,000 per borrower of Federal student loans (but not private student loans). One description of the latter indicates that the $10,000 of forgiveness would be accomplished by having the Department of Education make monthly payments on behalf of borrowers during the course of the “emergency.” Under this proposal, you would be able to stop making payment for a certain period of time and then would continue making payments in the future as if you had been making your payments instead of the Department of Education.
Defer Payments without Interest or Fees
Under this option, you take a break from making payments. At the same time, the creditor does not charge you any fees and no interest accrues on your outstanding balance. Once the break is over, you will make the same number and amounts of payments as you would have without the break, but they will extend further into the future. That is, your payment scheduled will be shifted by the length of the break.
On March 20, 2020, US President Trump announced that this approach would apply to Federal student loan payments. Federal student loan debtors will not have to make any payments for 60 days and no interest will accrue. If you have a US Federal student loan, you should research the details of this mandate, as debtors whose student loan payments are not currently in arrears will need to apply to get their payments suspended.Income taxes for 2019 are another example of payments that can be deferred without interest or fees as the result of the coronavirus upheaval. In the US, the Federal government and many states have extended the deadlines for filing and paying 2019 income taxes until July 15, 2020.
Defer Payments with Interest or Fees
Under this approach, the creditor allows you to take a break from making payments, but will charge you one or both of interest during the break and additional fees. Once the break is over, you will not only make the number and amounts of payments you would have without the break, but you will have to pay the additional interest and/or fees.If you select this option, you’ll need to understand when these additional amounts will be due.
Will they be due immediately at the end of the break?
Are the extra amounts added to each payment ?
Will you have to make more payments?
Utility Example
An example of this option is the Enmax Relief Program. Enmax is the power utility company in Alberta. It has indicated that it will allow customers to set up payment arrangements for overdue bills, but only if current monthly charges continue to be paid. It appears (though isn’t 100% clear) that customers who miss any payments, even customers with payment plans, will need to pay late charges.
Mortgages
According to an article in Forbes, many mortgage companies are also offering flexibility. Some Federal and state mortgage programs are halting foreclosures, but aren’t necessarily waiving or deferring payments. More importantly, some private mortgage companies are allowing payments to be deferred. Not all of these companies have been clear about how interest or late fees will be treated during this period. As such, if you need to defer some mortgage payments, it is important that you get the details specific to your lender and loan.
According to the Forbes article, Ally will allow mortgage payments to be deferred for 120 days with no late fees, but interest will accrue. That is, the total amount you will pay for your mortgage will increase by an amount slightly more than your annual interest rate divided by 12 times the number of months you defer your payments times your outstanding principal at the time you started deferring your payments. The “slightly more” in the previous sentence refers to the fact that the interest will compound over the deferral period, so you’ll have to pay interest not only on the outstanding principal but also on the interest that has accumulated since you made your most recent payment.
Deciding What to Do
Once you’ve understood the options available from your creditors, you’ll want to make informed decisions about whether to pay or defer your bills. In this section, I will illustrate the analysis you can do to help support your decision.In this illustration, you have $20,000 of emergency savings. You have a debt with $50,000 of outstanding principal, 10 years remaining on the term and a 5% interest rate. This combination of characteristics leads to a monthly payment of $530. Although the illustration looks at payment of a debt, it is equivalent to a monthly bill of the same amount. You are able to resume your regular payments at the end of three months.
When looking at the option to take the payment out of your emergency savings, I assume that you plan to replace that money within a year. I also assume that your emergency savings is in a checking, savings or money market account that is currently paying such a low interest rate that it can be ignored.
Waive Some Payments or Forgive Debt
No analysis is needed for the option under which a creditor offers to waive some of your payments or forgive your debt completely (without any additional costs on your part). You will always be better off if you accept the offer.
Deferring Payments without Interest
For this illustration, you defer three months of payments without interest. You re-stock your emergency savings within a year.
Take Out of Emergency Savings
The table below shows the cash flows and balances if you pay the three months of payments from your emergency savings.
In the first row, you see the three months of payments, totaling $1,590, that you pay the creditor from your emergency savings. The second row shows the payments you make from your income after the initial three-month period. The amounts you put in your emergency savings to bring it to the pre-crisis level are shown in the third row.
The last two rows show the ending balances for your emergency savings and the outstanding principal on your debt. At 3 months, you can see that your emergency savings has been reduced by $1,590. It returns to its original level after 12 months. Your principal declines to $0 in five years as anticipated under the original schedule, as you have made all payments as planned.
Defer Payments
The table below shows the cash flows and balances if you defer three months of payments.
In the first and third rows, you see that there are no payments to or from your emergency savings. The second row shows the payments you make from your income after the three-month deferral period. The total of these payments is the same as the total payments from your emergency savings and income (first and second rows) under the Take Out of Emergency Savings Strategy. The difference is that the $1,590 paid from your savings in the Take Out of Emergency Savings Strategy in the first three months is added to the amount paid from your income in the last column of the Defer Payments Strategy. In addition, the header on the last column shows that your payments are extended for three months to 5 years, 3 months instead of 5 years.
The last two rows show the ending balances for your emergency savings and principal. Your emergency savings stays constant at $20,000. Your principal doesn’t decrease in the first three months when you defer your payments. After that, your principal declines to $0 in five years and three months. It is higher at 12 months than under the Take Out of Emergency Savings Strategy because you deferred three months of payments.
How I’d Make the Decision to Pay or Defer Bills
When the creditor won't charge you extra interest or fees, the choice between whether to pay or defer your bills is one of personal preference. It depends not only on your current and anticipated future financial situations, but also any increase in your level of comfort by having more money in your emergency savings. The creditor isn’t increasing the amount you owe. As such, the financial inputs to the decision relate to the timing with which you make the payments to the creditor.
I would probably defer the payments unless I were expecting difficulty in making the extra three months of payments at the end of the loan term (because I was planning to retire in exactly five years and don’t want to change that goal, for example). I’d rather have the extra money in my emergency savings in case something else happens.
Defer Payments with Interest
For this illustration, you defer three months of payments at the loan’s interest rate with no late fees. If you tap your emergency savings, you re-stock them within a year.
Take Out of Emergency Savings
The transactions are the same under the “Take Out of Emergency Savings” Strategy regardless of whether the creditor charges interest on the deferred payments. I’ve shown the table again so it will be easier to compare it to the “Defer Payments” Strategy under this scenario.
Defer Payments
The table below shows the cash flows and balances if you defer the three months of payments during your time of reduced or no income.
In the first and third rows, you see no payments to or from your emergency savings. The second row shows the payments you make from your income after the three-month deferral period. For this illustration, the extra interest is added to each payment, increasing it from $530 to $537 a month and your payments extend for an extra three months (see header in last column). As a result, the total of the amounts paid the to creditor are $840 higher than if no interest had been charged.
The last two rows show the ending balances for your emergency savings and principal. Your emergency savings stays constant at $20,000. Your principal increases in the first three months as the additional interest is added during the deferral period. After that, your principal declines to $0 in five years and three months. It is higher at 12 months than under the Take Out of Emergency Savings Strategy because (a) you deferred three months of payments and (b) additional interest accrued.
How I’d Decide
From a financial perspective, you will be better off in this scenario if you make your payments out of your emergency savings because you will avoid paying interest or late fees. You also will have paid off your debt sooner – in five years instead of five years and three months.
Low Interest Rates
If the interest rate on your loan isn’t very high, say less than 6% a year, the additional payments may be relatively small. For example, at a 6% interest rate, the extra accumulated interest on a $200,000 loan with 10 years of payments left (such as our mortgage) is about $3,000. That may sound like a large number, but it adds only $34 to each payment.
Credit Cards
Some people are suggesting that you should make only the minimum payments on your credit cards as a way to keep as much cash in your emergency savings as possible. To date, I haven’t seen any credit card companies that are deferring interest or fees if you don’t pay your credit card in full. Credit card interest rates are generally quite high, often in excess of 10% per year, and many credit card companies charge fees if you don’t pay your balance in full. While many debts have interest rates that are low enough to justify deferring payments, most credit cards do not fall in that category. As such, I would pay off as much of my high-interest credit card balances as I could afford, even it if meant dipping into my emergency savings.
Personal Decision
Here is where the decision to pay or defer your bills becomes more personal. There is an emotional benefit to leaving the money in your emergency savings in case something else happens or your reduction in income lasts longer than you expect. You’ll need to weight that increased comfort level with the additional cost of deferring the payments under this scenario. For many people, the $34 a month increase in their mortgage payment in my illustration is a small cost to pay for the additional comfort. For other people, particularly those whose budgets are already very tight or who have a fixed amount of time until they retire, the increased payments and lengthening of the term of the loan are too expensive. As such, you’ll need to decide for yourself whether to pay or defer your bills, but now you’ll be able to make an informed decision.
Impact on Credit Rating
Another consideration in deciding whether to pay or defer your bills is your credit score. If you miss payments, there could be an adverse impact on your credit score, as timely payment is one of the important factors that drive your score. To be clear, if you make your payments from your emergency savings, there will be no adverse impact on your credit score. If you are not able to make your payments, even from your emergency savings, it is important that you communicate with your creditors and agree to a plan.
What Experian Says
I contacted Experian by e-mail and received the following quote from Rob Griffin, senior director of consumer education and awareness.“If you think you may have trouble making any of your monthly payments, contact your lender or creditor as soon as possible – try not to wait until you’ve missed your payment due date. Lenders may have several options for helping you cope with a variety of COVID-19-related financial hardships including placing your accounts in forbearance or deferment for a period of time. This means effectively suspending your payments until the crisis has passed and can help minimize the impact to the credit score if the account is in good standing and hasn’t had previous delinquencies reported. While reported in forbearance or deferment, your accounts will have no negative affect on the most common credit scores from FICO and VantageScore. Keep in mind, lenders do not want you to fall behind on your payments any more than you do. Contacting your lenders early can help you protect your financial health in the long run.”[1]
Other Credit Bureaus
I found similar statements on the web sites of the other two major credit bureaus, Equifax and Transunion.
How it Impacts You
These statements indicate that you may be able to avoid a deterioration in your credit score if you are proactive with your lenders about skipping or deferring payments.
[1] E-mail from Amanda Garofalo, PR Specialist, Experian, March 19, 2020.
