How online bill paying adds months to your life
Posted
Apr 29 2008, 08:33 AM
by
Karen Datko
This post comes from partner blog Blueprint for Financial Prosperity.
Back in the days of personal checks and monthly bills, "doing the bills" was an arduous task that took hours and hours. Back in the days of check registers and balancing a checkbook, doing the bills was like accounting lite.
With the advent of online checking and electronic bill-payment systems, there isn't any logical reason why you should be spending an hour or two each month dealing with bills. By setting up your bill-payment details and conducting your transactions entirely online, you can add months to your life.
Thank about this: Imagine you spend three hours a month dealing with bills. Three hours a month equates to a day and a half a year. That's basically one weekend a year (unless you do your bills at work!) that you lose because you are doing the bills. Consider that you'll be doing bills for most of your adult life. If you figure that you live past 75, you're talking about more than a year's worth of weekends lost just to do the bills.
When you put it in those terms, it's quite easy to make the jump and trust online bill payment as a means to recapture your weekends.
I auto-pay as much as I can. My cell phone bills and my cable/Internet bills are charged to a credit card, while my mortgage and my water bill are automatically debited from my checking account. The billing entities are established organizations that I trust with my banking information. I lose nothing in terms of privacy by giving them that information versus a personal check.
Other articles of interest at Blueprint for Financial Prosperity:
"How to start a credit history"
"Checking your credit score won't hurt your credit score"
"Outsourcing tax preparation: Admit your limitations"
