Best online bill paying service ?

Relying on downloaded transactions to appear when they clear means that you never know what your balance is. That's not for me.

Reply to
Ken Blake
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Said like a gay man. ;-)

Reply to
Margaret Wilson

The only time I have used/setup a bill payment on my banks website, BB&T, that transaction was downloaded the next time I updated that account. Which was *before* the date I scheduled. YMMV

In fact, BB&T or Quicken I don't know which, has a /feature/ that I find mildly annoying. I setup a repeating monthly transfer between my checking and savings accounts for the 3rd of each month. On the next download after the transfer takes place, the following months transfer is downloaded and presented for acceptance. This is not really a big deal, but if there are cleared transactions downloaded as well the only way to get to them is to accept the next months transfer. Which causes my ending balance to be wrong by the amount of the next transfer.

Reply to
Disciple

...Naw, she's simply married to a complete pussy. :)

Reply to
Scott en Aztlán

So you're the exception to the rule. Big deal.

I'm speaking about women in general - more women write checks then men.

Reply to
Andrew DeFaria

So you have given all of your checking account information - and permission for them to suck money out of your account - to each of your various billers?

I don't like third-parties to pull money out of my acccount.

I very much prefer to push it out of my account myself. If there's a screwup, it'll be at my bank, not the phone company or the cable company or any of the other places which are notorious for having such miserable customer service.

To each his own, I suppose.

Reply to
goaway

I hear you. Although I have never had a problem in 5+ years. But I agree with you "To each his own, I suppose."

Reply to
Michael T.

My compromise is to let companies I trust pull fixed amount or nearly fixed amount payments (e.g., mortgage loans, utility bills), but insist on pushing any highly variable or heavily usage dependent payments (e.g., credit cards, long distance phone charges).

Reply to
AES

Please be careful with attributions. Mr T did not post that - I did.

I guess I ought to amend what I wrote above. I do allow one biller to automatically pull a payment from my checking account: my mortgage. Which is, as you said, fixed (though they do seem to have to keep adjusting my payment because with property taxes going up, escrow for that gets bigger each year.)

But, yeah - the rest - all of which vary substantially (including the utility bills - especially heat!) - I push manually.

Reply to
goaway

Its very hard to stop some companies sometimes. Once they got your routing number they may use it forever. The only alternative is to close the account.

Reply to
rick++

I'm confused by the issue of banks that "charge". Citibank does not charge to send checks or pay bills electronically.

However, Citibank does charge a monthly fee (almost $10 as I remember) to provide the ability to download account information from Citibank into Quicken. Since this is an almost necessary part of using Quicken productively, it seems that the bank does, in reality, charge via a slightly different route.

At the moment I've gotten around this by using Quicken 2004, which still imports qif downloads. But starting next year,

2004 will have sunsetted and I will be forced to pay my bank a fee so that I can download my account information and payments into Quicken.

Louise

Reply to
louise

I've been using Quicken since the early 90s and have never found a need for downloading account information to it.

At first, of course, it was just a checkbook program anyway, so I set up my checking account in it and used it instead of the paper register. Write a check, enter it in quicken. (If I wasn't at my desk at the time, I wrote the check info on the back of my checkbook and then crossed it off when I copied it into quicken).

When it started handling credit cards, I did the same - when I charge something, the receipt goes into my wallet - about once a week, I take the stack of receipts out of my wallet and enter them into quicken. Takes only a few moments.

After all these years, I wonder if maybe you're on to something.

I'll have to see if my bank exports QIFs and maybe give it a try. But, really, my bank statements are the very least of my quicken concerns. I make far far fewer checking account transactions than credit card ones and I'm pretty sure that, even though I don't use it, my CC companies do offer direct syncing with Q.

All these years of entering things by hand. I don't know that it's actually been worth the aggregate time I've spent doing it - my banks have never made a mistake on my statements and the only fraudulent charges on my credit cards were quite obvious - so it's not like Quicken has saved me from any of those kinds of errors. But I do really like being able to figure out where my spending's gone, and especially like being able to search my history of transactions to find if/when I paid something, etc.

Reply to
goaway

The problem here is the use of the word "need". Indeed, use of Quicken itself is obviously not a "need" as millions of people don't use it and get by. You judge the ability to download as not needed in your situation. You're right! There's is no need. There is desire and a trade off between usefulness and expense and reasonable men can reasonably disagree based on their own particular situation, need and perceived value.

And yet it can do so much more like investment accounts, loans, planning, taxes, savings goal accounts, etc. So you don't fully utilize it and see little need for download. Others have more requirements than you.

Right. Correction of errors from major banks, who generally aren't in business to rip off customers (or won't be for very long) with hundreds of programmers and millions of dollars of computational equipment, computers and the like will probably not commit a lot of errors. The idea of tracking your spending is one thing. The idea of *actively managing* your money, knowing where it goes and learning how to minimize expenditures, maximize growth, plan for the future, etc. is really what Quicken is all about. You get there by constantly improving not only your financial astuteness but by more accurately recording and keeping track of your whole financial picture. When you do that you get more and more things to "manage" and take care of (IMHO people who boast "I only have one checking account, one CC account so I don't need anything else" are either A) ignorant of the many other factors in their financial life, B) not learning nor keeping track of other ways to increase their net worth, C) dismissive about real financial effects/concerns or other things in their life. In short, they are either clueless or like to hide their heads in the sand) you naturally look for ways to automate (scheduled transactions) and minimize tedious activities (download). That is unless you're a retired accountant who misses his job!

YMMV

Reply to
Andrew DeFaria

Actually, I do use it for all of that. But transactions in my on-CC accounts are relatively few. My brokerage and mutual funds accounts only have a couple a month.

Okay, well, the 'planning' tools haven't been of any use to me. I've never found a need for an explicit budget, for example. But the rest - goal-oriented accounts, various other investments, even depreciating assets (ie. car) are all things I've tracked in Quicken over the years.

I'm not tracking my current car, nor did I put it in as an asset when I bought it because it was not a substantial part of my net worth at the time and is now pretty much worthless anyway. But my previous car - at that time, it did represent a noticeable percentage of my net worth and even though I bought it with cash, I created an "asset" account for it and depreciated it monthly for a few years to smooth out the actual effect of that car on my assets.

I can't imagine not having all that information centralized.

Reply to
goaway

Know I'm helping to extend this thread beyond coast-to-coast length, but regarding "need", "desire", and "management", we still enter check (minimal) and CC transactions manually and use the FI downloads as "check and balance" and reconciliation.

While "obvious" fraudulent transactions do jump out on casual inspection - let alone popping up as New, we have found over time that some retailers - many encountered on trips abroad - resort to bumping up charges. While one might remember eating at X or buying at Y, if we didn't have the manual entry we wouldn't be aware of the discrepancies.

Our CC issuer adjusts the charges (we keep the chits until we reconcile) and my wife is happy, a good word to add to "need", "desire", and "management".

Jay

Reply to
Jay M Apple

I guess it depends on how many accounts/transactions you are managing. Still, I believe, where you can, automate, then you can concentrate on other, more important issues.

One of my main motivations for entering the asset side of things is that lacking it your net worth looks way too negative! That said, "Every penny counts" as the saying goes. Still, even though my car is entered as an asset I believe Quicken no longer offers downloading of car values and I, like probably everybody else, get lazy sometimes and I don't always have all of my /intended/ Quicken tracking up to date. Still I don't argue it's useless.

Exactly, so why wouldn't you want to use any and all tools at your disposal to help you in that endeavor? Downloading of transactions is but one of those tools. Yet you seemed to be saying that downloading of transactions is useless. Or at least that's what I was responding to.

Reply to
Andrew DeFaria

Not useless, but way waaaaay down at the bottom of my list of things I care about. And I have a hard time understanding why it's so urgent to some other folks. (see notes from other about how older quicken is cutting them off from downloads, etc).

Reply to
goaway

The answer is simple and contained in your own reply - because to others it is not waaaaay down on the bottom of their list!

Those are just people who are pissed because time marches onward...

Reply to
Andrew DeFaria

I had my eyes opened a few years back when I actually inventoried all financial accounts I touch one or more times a year. The motivation was because I had a couple of seriously ill friends. When they lost the capability of managing their finances, there were constant surprises in new bills turning up. I thought I was living a simple life- but I had over forty accounts. The largest category was the house- each utility, insurance, tax ... Then was work-related. Every fricken benefit- health, vision, dental, savings- has its own account. Bank-related accounts came in third. And if I was still raising children, I expect a large number of accounts there too.

I wish a knew a way of simply managing it, other than staying current each month. I pine for the days when I was a student and could inventory my accounts on the fingers of one hand.

Reply to
rick++

Whats Quicken got to do with it? I log into bill pay and do the payments. No Quicken involved.

I liked it better as First Union but so far anyway, I have no problems with Wacovia.

Reply to
Rich Greenberg

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