Most banks now offer their customers free on-line bill payment. This lets you pay all of your bills by logging-on to their website, entering the name, address, account number, and amount you want to pay. Once you enter in an address , you do not have to enter it in again. The following months you just click on the name, for example Chase credit card, enter how much you want to pay to that person or business, and click "send". How easy is that?

Besides time, you will also save on postage. We have on average about 12 recurring bills each month, which is 144 stamps per year, which would cost $53.28. That is not counting the non-recurring bills we might have to pay; tuition, lawyer, medical not covered by insurance, home repair, etc.

With on-line bill pay you also eliminate the chance that the payment will get lost in the mail. The bank routes your payment directly from your account, through the Federal Reserve's Automated Clearing House, and to the account of the company you are paying. Of course that is just for large companies. If you send me some money via on-line bill pay, the bank will actually cut a check and mail it to me. If it gets lost in the mail though, the bank takes responsibility for it, not you.

So what is the catch? What is in it for the bank to give you this seemingly too good to be true service for free? It saves the bank a huge amount of money. It is very expensive to route all of those cancelled paper checks around. I don't have an exact number, but I remember it being something around $2.00 per check! Of course that is not an incremental cost, but an average of all the overhead they have to maintain: buildings, staff, loading docks, expensive check sorters, etc. With on-line bill pay they have a few computers, a programming department, and some internet connections to maintain. The fewer checks they have to process, the more money they save. It's the perfect win-win situation!

This links to a demo site for a credit union's on-line bill pay site. It is fully functional, except that it won't actually cut a check. Once you open the link, click the "Add New Payee" button and go through the process of setting up a payee.

After that you can click on the "Schedule Single Payment" option and see what it is like to schedule a payment. You just select a payee from you list, enter the date, enter the amount. (The test payee you entered from the previous paragraph will not show up in this demo.)

If you are nervous about trying something new like this, why not sign up and just send one payment to get the feel for it. Maybe set up your credit card and just send and extra $5 to them, in addition to the traditional snail-mail way, so you can see how, and that it will, show up on your next month's statement.

Once you get the 20 or so payees set up that you write checks to each month, you will be surprised at how much time you save writing checks. It makes the process so much easier.

Remember too that you can also pay a bill from any internet connection. If you are at work and forgot about a bill, or are on vacation and forgot to pay the mortgage, no problem. Just find an internet connection, log-in, and voila! Your bill will be paid.

We have been using on-line bill pay for probably close to 6 years and have not had any problems. (Which also means we have probably saved over $300 in postage!) Very safe and secure and idiot proof. Actually, more safe and secure than the way you are doing it now.

Do it!