Comments on: Does Online Banking Work For You?

By: Brad Abare

Brad Abare — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 02:51:47 +0000

I use Paytrust. Hands down, it's best bill paying service out there. It works for all bills--both online and offline. You get your own address where all of your bills are sent to. They scan them in and e-mail you when you get a bill. You can setup automatic payments or pay them manually. It's like a personal assistant for all bills. And it organizes EVERYTHING electronically so you have a record of everything you do.

By: jaime

jaime — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 23:21:52 +0000

I have downloaded the files for Quicken, which was basically a one-click process, but I haven’t really used Quicken to keep track of our finances. I liked Money a lot better, but neither of our current computers has it.

By: kevin

kevin — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 17:16:34 +0000

Jaime, do you download the files for Quicken or Money? How well does that work? Is it pretty seemless?

By: jaime

jaime — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 16:29:15 +0000

Kevin, do it. Online banking is the single greatest product of the Internet era.

We bank with TCF and their bill payment system is easy to use. You do not have to have your bills sent to TCF. In fact, we only have one sent to them. It’s easy to manage your bill payment and you can easily review your records, modify the date you want the payment sent, or change the amounts you wish to pay.

Further, you can download files for Quicken and, I think, Microsoft Money, that keep you from having to re-enter data.

Online bill pay has saved me literally hours since I started using it. It used to take me about an hour, maybe more, to pay my bills the old-fashioned way. Now it takes 5 minutes. Plus, I never have to keep track of my stamp supply and I can easily check online to see if the payment has been sent, how much I sent last month, how much I have sent ever, etc.

I love it and would never want to go back.

By: dave

dave — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 20:02:40 +0000

I’ll see if I can get Jaime to comment on here for you since she handles our finances, but we do online banking and autopayments, and we use TCF and have had few problems that I personally am aware of. We have multiple accounts – joint savings, joint special savings, and we each have a personal checking account where we dump birthday and Christmas money and our weekly allowances. Jaime’s used their site more than I have, but it seems pretty easy to transfer money across these accounts. And she swears by autopay – paying bills takes her a fraction of the time it used to.

We don’t have the cashflow issue, though. I’m not sure how much of a difference that would make.