Comments (scroll down to add your own):

1. I’m too paranoid to automate our utility bill payments because we once had an instance of a major miscalculation in our bill.. as in, they incorrectly added hundreds of dollars to a bill which is normally $30. Had that bill been automated, I may not have seen the amount until it was paid, and that’s assuming I had enough in my checking account at the time to cover the bill.

   I do pay everything through my bank’s BillPay system, but I double-check every last charge each time to make sure they’re not cheating me. Yeah, I’m probably a little too paranoid, but that’s because everyone is always out to get me!

   Comment by Nick — Sep 4th 2006 @ 10:16 am

2. The only bills that I automate are ones that do not change from month to month, such as my student loans bill. Everything else I manually pay or schedule a month in advance.

   Comment by Blaine Moore — Sep 4th 2006 @ 11:30 am

3. In the words of Ronald Reagan, “trust but verify”.

   I have my mortage, home equity loan, car payment, and a 2 year “same as cash” loan set up for automatic payments (”pushes” from my bank billpay system). For all if these, I very carefully check to make sure that payments are posted, sometimes logging onto their respective websites to make sure everything is credited on their end.

   My biggest online banking blunder…I once had a Sprint cell phone bill of something like $36.25. When I entered it, I omitted the decimal point and paid them $3625. Oops! I got my money back maybe a week later.

   Comment by SteveK — Sep 4th 2006 @ 8:56 pm

4. When you get into a pattern of keeping track of finances and it goes out of sorts for whatever reason, I usually get a bit panicky about where they are even if I know they are fine. Good to hear things are back in order.

   Comment by savingadvice — Sep 5th 2006 @ 2:49 am

5. I think there are definitely benefits to automated bill paying: save stamps, no worrying about late bills, etc. However, I got burned once by paying a bill online. I used my bank’s free bill payment system to pay a bill on a storage unit. The system didn’t pay the bill on time, so I ended up having to cut a regular check for it. All the while, the bank’s system had my money in it’s account, not mine. After about 45 days, the system finally sent a check to the storage company, thus paying the bill TWICE. It all worked out, but I don’t generally pay bills online any more, especially via an automatic system.

   Comment by Andrew Flusche — Sep 9th 2006 @ 9:14 pm

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