海角大神

As I mentioned yesterday, one of the big advantages of online bill pay is that you can schedule payments on many of your bills in advance so that you don鈥檛 have to worry about paying them on time. Online bill pay just fires them off for you at the correct time.

Of course, that really only works if you know the amount of the bill in advance. It works great for mortgage payments or car payments or insurance payments, but for many of us, our cell phone bill and electric bill and other bills vary a little (or a lot) from month to month.

For those bills, you can鈥檛 just type in an amount well in advance and call it good enough. You鈥檒l either be drastically overpaying or, even worse, underpaying your bill.

Thankfully, many companies have a very useful solution already in place: automatic bill pay.聽

To put it simply,聽you can authorize your electric company or cell phone company to automatically withdraw an amount equal to your bill from your checking account on or near the bill鈥檚 due date.聽Most service providers allow this, and it鈥檚 an incredibly convenient.

First of all,聽it saves you time.聽You can just glance at a bill when you receive it and, if it seems sensible, file it. No stamps. No checks. No logging onto online banking. It鈥檚 just paid automatically.

厂别肠辞苍诲,听it further reduces the chance of any late payments. Late payments can cause you to owe late fees and can have a negative impact on your credit report. With automated bills, you can鈥檛 be late any more.

These two benefits alone add up to real savings, both in terms of time and money.

Some people have expressed concern about using such services and wondering about identity theft. Typically,the only information you provide when you sign up for this service is a voided check, and they already have your checks from your previous bill payment. You鈥檙e not providing them with any information the company doesn鈥檛 already have, in other words.

Another concern is that聽you need to make sure you keep a healthy checking account balance.聽If you let your balance get really low and then a bill is automatically paid for, you can easily overdraft. I maintain a minimum balance in my checking account and treat that level as essentially being zero; if I get below, say, $300, I react much as I would if the balance was $0 and I quickly strive to get more money in there. Overdrafting is an unnecessary expense for the prepared person.

Personally, I use both automatic bill payment through my online bill pay as well as automatic payments through my service provider to minimize my effort in paying all of my bills.

Try it yourself 鈥� you鈥檒l find that it saves you both money and time throughout each and every month. That鈥檚 a reward well worth striving for.

This post is part of a yearlong series called 鈥�365 Ways to Live Cheap (Revisited),鈥� in which I鈥檓 revisiting the entries from my book 鈥�365 Ways to Live Cheap,鈥� which is available聽at Amazon聽and at bookstores everywhere.聽