Online Bill Pay Your Way to a Four Hour Work Week

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 : )

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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