Aug 06 2008
Stamping out the High Cost of Bill Payments
Have you looked at the cost of stamps lately? Sheesh!
Can you believe it costs 42 cents in the United States to send a standard letter? Incidentally, that’s how much it costs if you pay a bill through the U.S. mail, but it does not need to.
To make it more concrete, take a look at the basic mathematics of the thing: Let’s say that you send four bill payments each month through the mail. That would end up costing you about twenty bucks at the end of a year that you could have saved had you just explored your other options.
What other options, you ask?
This is the Internet Age, baby! You can pay your bills online or have them automatically drafted from your checking or savings account. If you are like me and prefer the hands on approach, I recommend the former. It allows you to physically see the amount of the bill (painful but important) and to actually receive a payment confirmation at the time you are thinking about it. I’m scatterbrained at times and this has tended to be the method I use most often.
If you are a bit more organized than I or if you are the opposite - so disorganized that you often forget to pay your bills - I recommend using automatic draft. While this does require that you are mindful of the balance in your checking or savings account it also ensures that you don’t incur late fees from your debtor for being late yet again.
Think about it, check with your banking institution and find out what options will work best for you but for heaven’s sake - quit wasting your money on stamps when you don’t need to!
Here’s another option that I have found useful:
Paypal offers a free debit card for use with existing Paypal accounts. Since I receive payments through that company on a regular (weekly) basis, I opted for the card. Every time I use the card for signature purchases (that is, anything that is not specifically marked as a debit purchase), I get one percent (1%) of that purchase back as cash in my account.
1% doesn’t sound like much but if you consider that most interest bearing checking accounts (and many savings accounts for that matter) barely pay more than that, it’s a good idea to save that one percent every chance you get.
I didn’t know Paypal was offering services like that now. I shall have to look back into it again - it’s a long time since I used that account.
It’s hard to imagine that many people still pay bills by post these days, but I suppose there are still a lot of people who don’t trust the Internet for that purpose.
Great post! I’ve been paying all of my bills on line for awhile. Oddly enough, I haven’t used a stamp since they were still at a cost of 27 cents!