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Online Bill Pay Your Way to a Four Hour Work Week

February 20, 2008

My cheap friend at work thinks I’m crazy to pay a monthly fee for an online bill pay service.  I’m pretty tight with money so when I call him cheap that’s really saying something.

He’s thinks it’s even crazier still that I pay $20 annually to have them mail me a CD that contains all of my bills for the year.  He has a whole system of bill filling, paying, and spreadsheet tracking that he uses instead of paying for a service like mine.  Of course, he and his wife just had their first kid, we’ll see how long it is before he switches to my easy system : )

MonthlyExpenses

Our bill pay service puts all of our bills online.  They scan them in, then shred all of the paper documents so I don’t have to mess with opening and filing the bills. 

These documents, in addition to the ones that are delivered and paid online, are all available through our user account.  Once a year, they’ll send you a CD containing 12 months worth of bills if you’re willing to pay $20 for it.

The benefits are totally worth the amount spent in my opinion.  I just setup payment rules so every bill is automatically paid as long as it’s not over an amount I specified for that payee when I setup the account. 

What I love about the service is that I don’t have to spend any time on it. The service takes care of making the payments for me and I don’t have to do any kind of tracking or data entry, it’s all available via the web interface or annual CD.

Of course, I have to make sure there are funds in our bank account to cover the bills but that’s what direct deposit is for right?  I log into the site once every 2–3 weeks for a few minutes to make sure everything looks good and that’s it.

I can easily access spending summaries by category or payee or pull up bill detail in just a minute or two.  The best part is, I don’t actually have to do any work to make all this information available.  It automates and tracks our bills so I can spend my time enjoying friends or family or pursuing my goals. 

This automation of is one step towards achieving my version of a Four Hour Work Week.

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Comments

6 Responses to “Online Bill Pay Your Way to a Four Hour Work Week”

  1. john on February 20th, 2008 10:11 am

    Can you recommend a specific online bill payment service that provides such a service?

  2. Dave on February 20th, 2008 8:31 pm

    Yea.. what service is that?

  3. Ben on February 23rd, 2008 12:02 am

    There are many online bill pay providers out there but mycheckfree.com and paytrust.com are the ones that probably offer the most features.

  4. Carnival of Personal Finance #142 - The Homeless Edition — The Baglady on June 22nd, 2008 2:37 am

    [...] Ben from Money Smart Life shows us how to save time with an online billpay service in Online Bill Pay Your Way to a 4 Day Work Week. [...]

  5. FNBO Direct Online Savings Account - $25 Bonus for Online Bill Pay | Deals @ MoneySmartLife.com on September 17th, 2008 3:34 am

    [...] already use online bill pay to save a lot of time on bills but there is a fee so it would be nice to try out the features that [...]

  6. FNBO Direct Online Bill Pay | Money Smart Life on January 9th, 2009 7:33 am

    [...] got one yesterday about thier online bill pay service.  I’ve been using a third party online bill pay service for years and absolutely love how much time it saves me; I literally spend only 10 minutes a [...]

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