Simple Solutions
Shortcuts to managing your finances that are guaranteed to save you time and money.
From Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine, September 2005
Advertisement
Tame your paper tiger
Up to your neck in paperwork?
Simple solution: Go online.
Nearly one-third of U.S. consumers pay their bills online, says Judy Wicks, of CheckFree, the leading provider of electronic-billing and -payment services. One online convert is Scott Love, a 29-year-old public-relations executive from Boston. Love often returned home to piles of bills after his frequent business trips, and he worried that his payments wouldn't arrive in time to avoid late-payment penalties. So when Love's bank, Citizens, offered free online bill-paying, he tried it, becoming one of the 87% of online bill-payers who get the service free. "If I can find a way to save time, I will," he says.
Now Love, a movie buff, can add the couple of hours a month he once spent at a dreary task to his leisure time and take in a new film or enjoy long weekends skiing or relaxing on Cape Cod. He has arranged for recurring bills, such as the car loan on his Nissan Pathfinder, to be paid automatically every month; other payments take just a few minutes to schedule. When he's on the road, Love logs on to keep up with his finances. "I hand-write about one check every three months," he says, "and that's maybe to somebody who comes to the door selling cookies."
The easiest way to pay your bills online is to use a safe, encrypted service -- offered by banks, credit unions, brokers and companies such as AOL, MSN, Quicken or Yahoo -- that lets you pay as many of your bills as you can at one Web site. Often you can arrange for an e-mail reminder that a bill is due. The service can handle payments entirely electronically or it can generate a paper check, if necessary -- to pay the guy who mows your lawn, for example. If a payment is late, many bill-paying services will reimburse you for late fees up to a certain amount (sometimes as much as $50), as long as you've scheduled the payment within their guidelines.
To shed even more paperwork, you can arrange to receive bills and statements electronically. Sign up with e-billers on many services or at MyCheckFree.com.
Online bill-paying also helps Love keep his finances organized. "You have your records right there -- what you owe, past payments -- all on one site," he says.
Wells Fargo goes a step further: Its online-banking customers have access to My Spending Report, which they can use as a de facto budget. My Spending Report tracks online bill payments and Wells Fargo debit- and credit-card charges, and plugs them into one of 20 categories so that you can see how much you've spent on, say, groceries and restaurant meals.
And, of course, you can track your spending using Microsoft Money or Quicken. With Quicken 2006, once you pay a bill there's no need to print and file it. Instead, you can attach the bill electronically to the account from which you made your payment, so it's always at your fingertips.
-- Ronaleen R. Roha