Judy Heuman wrote:

In the past we have never taken a cruise longer than two weeks and
this was not a problem. But, we are planning a longer cruise for next
year -- a back to back -- taking 27 days plus a few days pre-cruise
and a day or two post-cruise.

I'm thinking ahead and wondering how we will pay the bills that arrive
while we're gone. Some of our bills are automatic payments and they
are no problem. But, I'm concerned about credit cards where the
amount payable is due each month and the credit card companies give
only 2 or 2 1/2 weeks in which to make the payment.

Reading this newsgroup I see quite a few of you have taken longer
holidays and I'd like to know how to solve the problem of paying the
bills while on a cruise. How do can we do this?

Is the only solution to do on-line banking knowing how inefficient the
Internet connections are while on the ship?

I'd appreciate your tips. Thanks.

We have gone away for four to six months on our boat. In addition to
having automatic payment for things like the phone bill, the satTV and
level payment plans (aka thrift plans) for the electricity and oil
bills, we handle the bills in several ways.

a) Have the mail forwarded to a trusted person (in our case it would
be a daughter, but there are mail forwarding services) who opens the
bills and pays them from an account we establish. Or in one case just
logs on to our bank account and pays them from there. Or emails us
with the amount and we do it on-line. This also takes care of stuff
that we didn't remember or expect like the safe deposit box payment.

b) Have one credit card automatically paid. We belong to a credit
union and we have a credit card from that credit union. Our bills are
calculated on the 5th so on about the 8th of the month the amount of
the bill is taken out of our checking account. When we do this we
stop using all our other cards at least three months prior to the trip
because sometimes the charges are not made in a timely manner. This
also assumes that you pay off your cards every month.

I absolutely do not use a public access computer for on-line banking.
I do not advise trying to find internet cafes as our on-line banking
cannot be done over a connection that is not secure and the internet
cafes I've used don't have secure browsers. I do not usually try to
do banking on the ship internet either, even using my laptop which I
find is marginally quicker than the ship computers.

There is also another possibility which I use rarely - mostly to get
cash from ATM machines, and that it is to use a debit card instead of
a credit card, both on the trip and before you go so as to clear out
the credit cards.