online billpay

Welcome to the club - and it's worse than you think. My Con Ed payment is always electronic - except last month when the decided to send a check which was 17 days late. Mine was done by Wells Fargo.

My next Con Ed payment was electronic again.

Here are some words of caution about your "word of warning".

While I certainly would not continue to utilize any business that did not serve my interest if I had any choice, I disagree that you have provided any evidence to prove your claims.

I have no idea what Mr. DeJoy intended to do, though I think it highly unlikely that he intended to ruin the USPS. Before making such claims, you should plan to provide evidence to prove them. Since I think it's virtually certain that you have no evidence to back your claim about Mr. DeJoy's intentions; I think you, and those reading your post, would be better served had you refrained from including what appears to be mostly an uninformed political comment.

Regarding the rest of your post:

Billpayers are the sole determiners of how much lead time is required to deliver a billpay check. If the billpayer chooses a lead time that is too short, that is on them - it certainly is not a Quicken problem.

Regardless of the lead time set by the billpayer, once you're aware of an inaccuracy in that lead time, you can effectively offset that inaccuracy by choosing a delivery date that takes into account what you determine to be a "better" lead time.

One astonishing aspect of your post is that it suggests that you are totally unaware of the current Covid-19 pandemic; which has put all the world's supply chains under a duress they have never experienced before.

Adding to that problem, the USPS has long been a poorly run business and the pandemic has only exacerbated the USPS' problems. The USPS began as a government owned business, and no government business can successfully compete with privately owned businesses. That's why the original government post office (and the current USPS - still, for all purposes, a government business), require monopoly control of their segment of the "delivery business". That's also why USPS' problems can only be addressed via politics - rather that the normal approach where customers who don't like the service they get, switch to a business that does a better job.

[The one-and-only time in over twenty years that any of my online billpay transactions was "late", the billpayer (BofA) contacted the payee and told them that they (BofA) had sent the payment with a lead time sufficient for the payment to arrive by the "due date" ... which was to say that the payment was late due to the postal service. The payee accepted that explanation and I was not docked for a late payment. I have NO legal expertise, but I suspect that sending a payment early enough for normal postal delivery is strong evidence against any adverse affects. Remember: even the IRS only cares about the postmarked date on your tax payments ... not the date they received the payment.]

There are multiple privately owned delivery businesses that are making deliveries on time (I've seen no problem with any of my Amazon deliveries, for example; Amazon chooses the best delivery company for the job ... sometimes including their own). Why do you suppose the government controlled, union burdened, USPS monopoly can not make its deliveries on time? [That's a rhetorical question.]

Here's a follow-up rhetorical question: what do you think the delivery times for your billpay checks would be, if private delivery companies were allowed to deliver those billpay checks?

Personally, I have no intention of changing any of my online billpay options based on my experiences to date ... much less your comments here.

} On Monday, March 1, 2021 at 2:14:03 PM UTC-6, Bernie Cosell wrote: } > A word of warning: online billpay for payees that have to be sent a check } > barely works at all. I had one outstanding a few weeks back that arrived } > two weeks late [that is, two weeks after the "deliver by" date, three weeks } > in transit] } > } > I'm now sitting on two that are "only" one week late. The W-F lead time is } > for delivery in a week, so they've now been two weeks in transit. I don't } > know how to tell which payees can get an electronic transfer versus which } > have to have checks mailed to them but I'm guessing that the credit cards } > will go electronically and I think I'll have to abandon online billpay and } > try to put everything important on one or another credit card whenever I } > can. UGH } Billpayers are the sole determiners of how much lead time is required to deliver a billpay check. If the billpayer chooses a lead\ time that is too short, that is on them - it certainly is not a Quicken problem.

Nope, I know that 100%. I was just warning folk about the current state of first-class mail delivery. In these cases, I had no choice: the bills were issued with , what I now know, is insufficient lead time. I pay bills, generally, the day they arrive and when, while doing that, they

*still* arrive late there's little I can do.

} [The one-and-only time in over twenty years that any of my online billpay transactions was "late", the billpayer (BofA) ...contacted the payee and told them that they (BofA) had sent the ... payment with a lead time sufficient for the payment to arrive by the .. "due date" ... which was to say that the payment was late due to the ... postal service. The payee accepted that explanation and I was not ... docked for a late payment.

Wells-Fargo won't do that -- I asked about the status of my bill-pay and they denied any knowledge or record of it. They said that the first and only time it'll show up in my account is when the check clears... there's no "pending payments" or anything like that I can refer to to prove that I tried to pay the bill quickly -- the only thing I have is *Quicken's* indication of the payment. I can try showing that to the payee and see if it flies.

I know that if I use the bank's website to do an online billpay it'll show up in the online payee list and so there's a positive record, from the bank, of the payment and when I sent it and when the bank expected it to be delivered. With billpay through quicken, is Wells-Fargo alone in not recording any existence of the payment until the check is deposited?

} ...I have NO legal expertise, but I suspect that sending a payment early enough for normal postal delivery is ... strong evidence against any adverse affects.

but, as I mentioned above, I wonder if just Quicken's record would carry the same weight in the absence of any record at the paying bank

} Here's a follow-up rhetorical question: what do you think the delivery times for your billpay checks would be, if private ... delivery companies were allowed to deliver those billpay checks?

I don't have an opinion on that. l what I think is that the USPS should be run as a government service, rather than being expected to show a profit just from stamp sales [and other similar services]. I don't expect my library to have to function solely from the income from overdue fines and bake sales. I don;'t expect *every* county road to become a toll road and have the tolls be expected to pay for maintenance and upkeep. Lord knows how airports would work if the FAA had to collect enough money so that running the airlanes and maintaining the navigation systems and the airports had to be revenue neutral.

Wow! I don't recall ever receiving a bill that was due sooner than some three weeks in the future.

I'd be looking for a new billpayer, and some new payees (with earlier notification for amounts due).

I would also be checking into the legal liability: when the USPS is the only reasonable delivery system, I'd be surprised if the postmark date of the payment would not give you protection. I'd also be digging deeper with the bank regarding their policies and their records (if they're mailing checks to pay their customer's bills, it seems they should have a user-accessible record of the date the payment was mailed). Sometimes front-line service personnel don't get things right.

That's bizarre.

I understand that the billpay "instruction" would not appear in your checking account at the bank, but for it not to appear anywhere at the billpayer's web site seems nearly impossible to me. The bank must have the billpay instruction stored (how else could they accept, and carry out, an instruction to pay weeks in the future).

Every one of my online billpay instructions - whether created in, and sent from, Quicken; or manually entered at Bank of America - appears on the bank's online billpay web page. And regardless of how that billpay instruction got there, I can modify it at that same bank billpay web page (as long as the processing of that specific payment has not begun).

The only bank I have experience with regarding sending billpay instructions from Quicken, is BofA, and (as noted above), I can see every billpay instruction (regardless of the source of the instruction) at the bank's web site.

I also have billpay with my USAA account, but USAA does not accept billpay instructions from Quicken. Still, when I manually create a billpay instruction at USAA's web site, that instruction is clearly visible ... until that online bill is paid. Then - as with BofA - the resultant payment transaction appears in my billpay account (I only use my checking account for paying online bills).

And with both BofA and USAA there is a long term billpay record at the bank's web site. I can see the history of my online bill payments - for 180 days at USAA, for a year at BofA. And I can print the info about each bill payment made: probably not as good as a notice from USPS of "proof of mailing" or "proof of delivery", but I think it would be useful in a dispute over a late payment.

I don't think your Quicken record of having sent a billpay instruction to the bank would carry much weight. As I mentioned above, I think a record of the date the payment was sent would carry some weight. How much weight is likely a legal question I don't have the expertise to answer.

How is it then that UPS, FedEx, and Amazon's own delivery service are managing to deliver on time, while USPS is failing? That's more-or-less a rhetorical question, since it should be clear that none of those companies that are delivering on time has any monopoly on the ability to deliver, while USPS has a true monopoly on the delivery of first class mail. When companies are required to actually earn their revenues, their customers benefit.

Why would you expect a private library to limit their income sources to fines and bake sales? How about charging for the service being provided; i.e., the book borrower pays to borrow the book. Paying for goods and services is not a novel idea, it's an idea that has been proven to provide the best possible goods and services.

Perhaps you should do some rethinking - starting with some investigating. There's a lot of good information available about the privatization of many services that have traditionally been thought of as necessarily government functions.

The value of toll roads (the road user pays) is being proven around the globe (including here in the U.S.), while the old "let the government do it with tax dollars" (let everyone pay) is failing. Gas taxes have not covered our highway needs for years now, what with cars getting much better gas mileage, and governments being unwilling to raise the gasoline tax (a revenue source which would ultimately be doomed anyway). So local roads are increasingly paid for with taxes like property taxes (which have little relationship to road usage) ... or not paid for at all when the need is there but tax payers put up significant fights. A situation where lots of people wind up "paying" by having to sit for long periods in traffic jams.

Toll roads have the ability to charge those who use them (and not those who don't) while controlling the efficiency of the road by using adjustable tolls to limit road use to its customer-determined effective capacity. For example: charging higher tolls during rush hour tends to keep the folks heading to the beach to surf from clogging the highways during rush hour.

And we now have the ability to inexpensively toll all roads: the only real stumbling block to doing so is people's (legitimate) fear of having their movements tracked by the government (who would certainly be able to get access to any toll road's data).

Still, the right way to pay for roads is to have those who use the roads pay their fair share of their costs. For local roads, that could be done by a fee for miles driven, paid when renewing auto registration. Miles driven = last year's odometer reading subtracted from this year's odometer reading. The yearly fee would be adjusted down for any toll road fees paid during the year. Not quite as fair as direct tolls for all roads, but much better than gas taxes, etc. or no improvements.

There are quite a few privately owned airports in the world, and two of them are in the U.S. (one of those is in Puerto Rico, the other in New Jersey).

And several countries (Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom) have basically privatized their air-traffic control services (paid for by user fees) and found that the result is measurably better service, for the same or less money. To say nothing of finding it much easier to modernize their equipment to increase safety.