Kevin's Weblog 2006-12-31

47) No Monthly Checks (all bills auto-paid)

2006-12-31 10:50 in /life

47) No Monthly Checks (all bills auto-paid)

At this point, I have all of our monthly or bimonthly bills being paid automatically out of the credit card or bank account, except for our rent and the trash bill. I’ve never heard of an independent landlord being set up to take direct bank payments, so that one will probably have to wait until we buy a house and have the mortgage payments deducted directly from the bank account.

As for the trash bill, we might have to move for that one too. Portland has this bizarre trash system where there are 30 or so companies contracted to pickup various sections of the city. If you do the math, that works out to about 5000 households per company. So, these guys are seriously small operations. Ours seems particularly rinky-dink. They don’t even send bills in envelopes; instead, I get a postcard with my bill. If the bill has more line items than fit on one postcard, they send a second postcard. I am not making this up. So, auto-billing seems like a lot to ask.

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Jeremy Leader wrote:

My bank (and most others, I suspect) will mail physical checks to payees who can't handle direct electronic transfers. I can't set it up to automatically deduct a varying amount each month in response to a bill, the way I could with e.g. the phone bill, but for a fixed monthly amount, it works fine.
I assume the banks lose money on each such transaction, but do it to encourage overall adoption of on-line bill payment.

(2007-01-03 21:55)

Kevin wrote:

That had occurred to me, but I discounted the idea because the last time I had looked into it, my bank charged $3/mo to use bill payment. However, I just checked again, and now they waive that if you pay at least 3 bills a month using it. Of course, currently I've only got 2 I need handles, but I can probably shift one or more of the bills that are currently deducting from my bank account anyway to go through the bill payment system.

(2007-01-03 23:24)

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Kevin's Weblog

2006-12-31

47) No Monthly Checks (all bills auto-paid)

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