Paying Bills

Monday is always the day that I pay bills. I am generally pretty good about making sure all of them are paid on-time. One thing that helps is a filing box that my youngest son got me for Christmas one year. It has 31 numbered slots. The idea is that you file your bills on their monthly due date. If a bill is due on October 15th, it goes in the slot with the 15 label. Then when I go to pay bills, I pay everything due over the next two weeks.

When my bank started offering electronic bill paying, I didn't bother signing up. I had a great system that worked and wasn't interested in putting everything on the computer. One day when I was getting low on postage stamps, I decided to give my bank's online service a try. I entered the information for that week's payments and was amazed at how much quicker I was done. I didn't have to write a check nor did I have to lick any nasty envelopes. Furthermore, I saved myself a couple of bucks in postage. When it came time to pay bills the next week, I entered more payments into the online system and continued using the free service. I haven't stopped since.

I generally pay about five bills per week. Sometimes there are more and sometimes less, but five is a good average. It used to take me about an hour to pay the bills. Some of that is because I do it during the Monday night football game and spend a lot of time watching the game. When I moved to the electronic method, I cut that time in half. I didn't realize how long it was taking me to write checks and make appropriate entries in my monthly budget. That is all done on the computer and I type a lot faster than I write.

The biggest benefit I have realized by using the bank's electronic bill-pay service is the cost savings in stamps. I am a big fan of the US Postal Service. I think they are the subject of a lot of old jokes that just aren't true any more. Considering how little it costs to send a letter and generally how quickly it gets to its destination, the postal service does an amazing job. However I am now saving myself 20 to 25 stamps every month. That amounts to about $10 each month. It may not sound like much but it adds up over the years.

One final benefit is that I don't have to worry about the check actually arriving. I was once driving down the freeway and saw a mail truck off on the side of the road in flames. Accidents do happen and I felt sorry for all those people who really had sent checks in the mail only to have them turn to ash.

I was reluctant to start but now endorse electronic bill paying. That is one of those increases in efficiencies gained by the ubiquity of personal computers and the Internet. Now I can pay more attention to the game.