How to Pay Your Bills – 2 Convenient Ways

In our last post, we discussed how you should handle past due bills.  In this post, we will discuss two convenient ways to pay your bills.

First, let’s be clear. By bills, we are talking about your living expenses and debts.  Examples of living expenses are rent, utilities and transportation costs.  Debts would be payments made toward balances owed on credit cards, student loans, car note, etc.

2 Convenient Ways to Pay Your Bills 

One, take advantage of the online bill pay feature offered by your bank or credit union.  Most banks/credit unions offer the ability to pay your bills by going through their payment processing system.  How is this done?  Typically you need to do the following:

• Add the name of the creditor, your account number you have with the creditor, the creditor’s address and the name on the account.  For example, if you pay your electric bill for your apartment each month to ABC Electric, you would add this account in your bank’s online bill pay system.  You would add ABC Electric as the compay name, add the account number assigned to you by ABC Electric, the address where ABC Electric is located and whoever’s name (yours and/or roommate’s name) is listed on the account.

Advantages of online bill pay

• Convenient. You only need to enter your account info for each creditor once to make repeated payments
• Payments can easily be deducted from your bank’s checking account
• You are alerted when your payments will be received by each creditor. This minimizes the chances of paying late fees.

Disadvantage of online bill pay

• Payment is usually not instantaneous.  It typically takes 2 to 3 days and sometimes longer for payments to be delivered to your creditor. This method may not be the best option if you are payaing your bill late.

 

Second, you can also pay your bills on each creditors’ website.  Using the previous, your electric bills can be paid on ABC Electric’s website.  You would need to do the following:

• Go to the official website of each creditor
• Create an online account.  You would enter your assigned account number, create a username and password
• Once you have created your online account, your billing information will populate along with other information regarding your account
• To pay, you would enter the account information of your bank/credit union, credit or debit card account

Advantages of paying bills via creditors’ websites

• Payment is often recorded as being received the same day payment is made.  Your balance will be updated few days later once payment has actually posted onto the account but receipt of payment typically is the date payment is made.
• Best option if payment is being made close to due date to avoid late fees
• Multiply accounts can be added to bills pay from

Disadvantage of paying bills via creditors’ website

• Can accidentally choose incorrect bank account, credit or debit account to pay bill because more than one may have been added. This error can be avoided by taking a few seconds to double check which account you really want funds to be pulled from to pay your bills
• Creditors’ website can be down for maintenance especially in the evening or weekends.  To avoid this, try to pay your bills days in advance of the due date to allow for such instances

 

There you have it.  Two convenient ways to pay your bills!

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Dr. Linda