The other option is you can make the January full payment by credit card. If you use a card that has some type of rewards associated with it (EG airline miles, etc), that may be worth more to you than any accrued interest you might get leaving the money in the bank.
Our GM card gives 5% toward our next car purchase. Our bank on simple savings account is paying less than 3% APR of which I would actually only receive a fraction since the entire dues amount is not there for the whole year, being paid out every month in direct debits. (1/12th only gets 1 months interest, 1/12th gets 2 months interest, 1/12th gets 3 months interest.....etc.)
If your dues are $1200, and you had it in an interest account paying 3%, you would receive a total of $16.50 interest over the year.
By charging on my GM card, I get $60 off my next purchase of a new car.
For someone else, getting FF miles for example, it would be simple to compare the value of the miles vs. $16.50
For me, to break even, I would have to get 10.9% interest somewhere to match the 5% I get using the GM card.
<i>Note: your results may vary.....</i>
If you really want to get into this, you can also pay by credit card, and use a home equity loan to pay off the credit card charge, then pay the home equity loan monthly through a direct debit.
Currently our home equity loan is 4.75%. We can simply write a check for anything and it automatically goes onto the loan. The loan is automatically paid thru debits monthly, just as if Disney debited the account. The advantage is that we get $60 credit toward a GM purchase, and only pay $18 in interest for the year, a net gain of $42., and I never used any of my own up front money. (Basically I 'purchased' $60 of car rebates for $18. Actually a little less since the $18 is tax deductible)
Of course this works only if you pay your credit card bills in full each month.