Online Bill pay vs. Snail Mail

[momof1in150]

My bank, USAA, allows me to go in and pay a bill online. That's what I would do, to avoid the stamps and the errors that come with giving out your bank information.

Love USAA - the web bill pay program is great. My old landlord lost a check and USAA was fast to credit the money back to my account and cut a new check without any fees.

[FrugalIII]

I've been using autopay from my checking account for years and have had no problems at all. My phone bill, my gas bill, my electric bill, my car payment, car insurance, home insurance and home equity loan are all paid that way. Never once had a problem. Maybe I'm just lucky! I write almost 0 checks anymore.

[disneysteve]

I do a combination. Several bills are paid through Bank of America online banking. That is manual. I go in each month and send the payment. I pay my mortgage manually at the lender's website. Most other bills are automatically billed to my credit card (and then I pay the CC bill with online banking). Finally, I have a few bills that auto-withdraw from the checking account. I've never had a problem with any of them double billing.

[feh]

I agree 100% with this. I pay almost all of my bills by CC then pay CC with online bill pay. The only exception is the water bill; government agencies by law must pass on the credit card processing fee to the consumer and I refuse to pay somebody to take my money so I pay them online through the bank.

I am surprised that State Farm doesn't take CC for you. I always pay State Farm by credit card (online of course).

Yes, we also pay our CC bill online, and in full, each month. Making monthly payments in this manner is a great way to get rewards.

I'll have to check into paying State Farm online. Thanks for the info!

[Daylily]

I love online bill pay. I used to love the process of writing out all the checks and stuffing the envelopes and placing the stamps on the envelopes. Then one year we left the country for three weeks so I finally set myself up for online bill pay so that I could have the bills paid from my bank account while I was away. Now that I've been doing it for several years I figure I've saved around $140 in postage over that time.

I wish I could have some of my monthly recurring bills charged to my credit card but none of the utilities will accept credit card payment. That would be so much easier and quicker.

I only have one bill set up for auto-debit. I could do more but I did get bit by this one time years ago. I think it was the electric company. We were young and didn't have much of a cushion in those days (first job out of college) and the gas & electric company 'estimated' my usage for the month rather than doing an actual read and they estimated by about double my normal usage! I was fuming.

[atomicrc11]

Some banks actually use CheckFree as their bill pay. Two that I know of are Fidelity mySmartCash and Schwab Investor Checking accounts use CheckFree. Bank of America does have great online billpay, but I don't use it as my primary checking, just usually for deposits.