Online Bill Pay Saved My Bacon

I meant to post about this before, but completely forgot.

When we went to the lake for a week or so awhile back, my second bill-paying session of the month fell during the vacation. (Yes, I'm that scheduled, that I have two days a month where I sit down and queue up the bills, and my Google Calendar is set up to send me reminders to do it. I highly recommend this.)

I meant to do them early, but getting ready for the trip and B wrangling ate up all my time, and the day we were leaving, I still had a pile of un-queued bills. I then meant to grab my bills and I would queue them once we got onto a trusted wireless network at the lake. (I don't recommend accessing your bank account or other financial information on a hotel wireless network. Maybe that's paranoid, but I still wouldn't do it.)

Well, I forgot to grab the pile of bills as we left the house. What I did have was my payment history, all in one place on my bank's website. With that, I had average bill amounts (and many of our bills don't vary from month to month, like cable, wireless, etc.) and monthly due dates, all without a single bill that was mailed to me. I just queued the payments for what I thought were ballpark correct amounts, erring on the side of having a credit instead of underpaying.

When I got back and went through the bills, I found that I had everything covered, and we only had a credits of more than $5 with one bill, where we have a $20 credit for next month.

If your bank offers you free online bill pay, I'd give it a look. I really appreciated its existence last month, because it saved me from trying to remember every bill, remember separate login information for all their websites, and then saved me "online bill pay fees" that some of our bills charge for paying them online.

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