Heh. I’ve been there. “I was just reading that book, I know my tax refund check is not being used as a bookmark.”
Checks don’t exist in Japan, but I get all our household bills delivered to the house, but they are just notices of payment. The bills are all direct debited from our bank account. The paper that arrives is just the receipt for the last month and notice of how much will be taken this time.
We have a separate bills account, so each month we do an electronic transfer of a set sum to that account, and never think about them again.
I do keep our own family/business books so I know the seasonal averages for bills but there has never been a discrepancy.
We would lose the paper bills. Hell, we do lose them. Then again, we’re slobs.
I pay very few bills by paper any more. We do receive some, but we have reminders set up in Quicken so that at the very least we have that to let us know that something’s coming up that we need to look out for.
Of course, that doesn’t help with the more intermittent things like medical bills, which tend to get… overlooked.
Back to the question in the OP:
We get everything online that we can get online. Some (like the water bill) won’t do e-billing. The water bill in fact was tough to set up for auto-payment - there’s no way for us to initiate a payment online, and we had to actually mail something to them to get them set up for auto-debit. I don’t love the auto-debit but I’m sure it’s kept me from forgetting to pay. Almost everything else is all electronic billing, and we either have them auto-debit, or I pay from their website. A few, I pay from the credit union’s website.
Age: 50, female, and I’m the one who was online while being prepped for an emergency c-section, so clearly I’m not a technophobe :).
The only bill I receive and don’t pay online is when I have my car serviced. They hand me a bill when I pick it up and I pay by card there and then. Other than that it would be over a decade since I paid a bill in person.
Not only are they all paid online (save rent, which is a check to my roommate,) but most are auto-debit to boot. I have a bad memory for things like that, so I was constantly getting late fees and notices. So I have my phone bill, car insurance, student loans, and car payment all auto-debited. The insurance, student loans and phone bill are set up to auto-debit from the website of the service (so five different websites (insurance, phone, and 3 student loan vendors,)) and the car payment is a “recurring payment” from my bank’s checking account. The reason the first four are from their own websites, even though it’s more work for me, is because in my experience the payments go faster if the company is “pulling” the money from my bank than if my bank is “pushing” the money to the company.
The only regular bill I have that’s not auto-debited is my Discover card, since I don’t know what it would do if it was on auto-debit…the whole amount? Just the minimum? At any rate, I have a reminder on my phone to pay that bill on the first of the month (payments aren’t due until the 12th, but this way I know it will never be late, even if for some reason the electronic payment is delayed.)
And all of my bills are paperless than can be (my car payment is through a local credit union that doesn’t have e-statements yet.) I do remember, though, that up until last September, before I switched to a new mobile phone company, that I still got a paper bill because AT&T, my old provider, wanted to charge me to go paperless. Yes, I wold be doing them a favor by saving them the cost of paper and postage (granted, probably a whopping 40 cents worth,) and they wanted to bill me just the low, low price of…well, I forget the exact amount, but it was in the range of $1-$3, IIRC. But Sprint has free paperless billing (like everyone else in the world, seriously, WTF AT&T?) so I went and signed up for that when I got the phone plan…never had a Sprint bill in the mail ever!
What really annoys me, though, is that my two credit cards (one is an old Chase card I use like once a year just to keep it in ‘good standing’, and my current Discover card I use for as much as possible (yay cash back!)) both still send me those stupid “credit card check” things in the mail. You can tell what they are from the outside of the envelope most of the time, so I get worried because it seems like an easy thing for someone to steal and then go write several checks in my name. And since they get processed like checks, it could takes weeks before I found out.
I pay all that I can online.
Online for everything that accepts it. I’m still amazed that Kohls hasn’t entered the 21st century.
I pay my bills online but never allow automatic deductions from my account.
Once you allow access, it seems they can take whatever amount they want, whenever they want and it’s your problem to try and get it back. I had problems in the past with this and had to finally close the account to get the damn deductions to stop. You would think asking the bank to stop allowing it would be enough but it wasn’t.
http://www.moneyville.ca/article/903132–roseman-hydro-client-loses-12-000-to-billing-error
This guy had 12 grand taken out when he was expecting $477.
I have a Kohl’s card that I pay online the three or so times a year I actually use it.
it is tricky to figure out, though, because to log into the website for the Kohl’s card isn’t the same as the regular Kohl’s shopping website.
To very loosely paraphrase Sean Connery as Henry Jones, Sr.: “I put them in The Pile so I don’t have to keep track of them.”
We don’t have that many recurring bills, but I’ll admit that I do not remember (without checking) when during the month each one is due. Every few days I’ll go through The Pile, paying what bills are in it (almost exclusively using BofA’s online bill payment system), and noting said payment on the bill before filing it.
I won’t claim this system is perfect, but it works well enough and has inertia behind it.
We could argue back and forth about whether this system has a higher or lower probability of an error (e.g, late or lost payment) than any other method, but in practice the probability of error has proven low enough to satisfy me. Back to that inertia thing again… 
Don’t know about yours but all my cc companies that send those stupid checks require you to call from your “home” phone (phone they have on record) to activate the checks before using. I still hate getting them but at least there is some security.
I pay everything through my bank’s online banking and have always paid my Kohl’s account that way.
I can’t understand how or why people are talking about paying online through each individual biller. A lot of them charge a couple dollars fee for the privilege. however, most banks and credit unions offer fee-free online bill pay if you have an account in good standing or use direct deposit or something. So there is just no need at all to go to a dozen different web sites and pay a dozen different service fees to pay your bills, when you can just go to yourbank.com, pay all your bills in one shot and for no fees.
What am I missing here?
Mine don’t. If I don’t use those checks (which I rarely do), I shred them.
I pay all my bills online. Not only that, for all bills that allow it (phone, cell phone, cable TV) the bills automatically get charged to my American Express card (which I then pay online). That’s because my Amex card gives me Air Miles.
I don’t let any companies withdraw from my bank account automatically. I’m not THAT trusting. I always initiate the payment myself (in the case of Rent it is an automatically recurring payment, but it is still under my absolute control).
There are risks, but there are risks in everything you do.
I have paper bills mailed to the house still but pay everything online.
We don’t have them emailed because every six months we hand over bill paying responsibility. We found that when either my husband or I had full responsibility for bill paying the other lost track of our financial status. This way we’re not out of touch long enough to lose track. Also we both dislike it so it shares the pain 
I will also note that we have turned down the option of automatic withdrawls from every company that offers it. I’ve seen too many billing mistakes to be comfortable allowing them to withdraw without my confirmation that the amount is correct.
Just about all of my vendors work in conjunction with BillPay, which is a centralized online bill paying service connected to my checking account.
Just about all of my credit card, utilities, and insurance companies are set up to e-invoice though BillPay. In other words, they notify me when an invoice is due and for how much. It makes bill paying a cinch. I log onto my BillPay account once a week to see which vendors have invoices due (they turn red so that they’re easily distinguishable), and in a few clicks I’ve scheduled payments for all of them.
Kohls and my local savings & loan are the only major vendors who don’t do e-invoices through BillPay. Instead, they still send out the paper statements. Yes, I can still schedule a payment on THEIR website or via BillPay, but I have to manually type in the dollar amount and due date. It’s not a huge deal, but it does kind of puzzle me why they don’t just play along like everyone else.
The fact that none of the online bill pay systems I use charge a fee?
If any of them did charge a fee, I would stop using them. As for why I chose to go with their services rather than set it all up with my bank…I don’t know…I guess because I want to set up an online account with them anyway, to check the balance, see how many minutes I have left on my cell plan ,that sort of thing. I guess I figured I might as well put in my bank info and have it auto-debit while I’m doing that.
It’s also the only way I have found to avoid missing payments. Even with giving myself email reminders, having an alarm on my phone, etc…I still, for some reason, say to myself “oh yeah, that bill is due…eh, I’ll pay it later” and then forget to pay it. Even if I am right there sitting at my computer! It’s like I expect the bill to magically go away tomorrow, or something, and I won’t have to pay. So with auto-debit I don’t have to worry about forgetting and procrastinating. Is it riskier? A little, yes, but in several years of doing it I haven’t had any problems. I always have the auto-debit scheduled several days after I get the bill in my email, so if for some reason it wasn’t what I expected, I have time to stop the payment.
Okay, then. Ignorance fought. 
I’m late to the party, but …
We don’t pay anything online unless we have to. The reason is not the OP’s hypothesis that I’m afraid of banks being hacked. In our case, we’re broke as a joke and if we set things up to where a bill is paid automatically on X date, we may not necessarily have the money available right then (perhaps a paycheck comes the day after X, for example). Unfortunately, we still need the option to pay things late.
I realize that there are options to pay bills online on whatever date you choose, but frankly: our situation is a bit volatile. Sometimes one of us has enough to pay all the bills that have come in, and sometimes we have to do a little “Okay, I can pay A & C, but no way can I afford B. Can you pay that one?” So for us, it’s easier to have the bills all come in by mail, so they’re all in a pile together, enough to make it worth paying for a few stamps.
Also: inertia. This is how we’ve paid things in the past + we’re lazy = this is how we’re paying things today and for the foreseeable tomorrow.
I pay all my bills online except my rent. Gah, annoying to have to write a check every month. But they’re small, I think they only have a handful of properties. I don’t get any bills in the mail except my water/gas bill. Which is annoying there, too, because it’s automatically deducted out of my account. ?? I wish they’d just send me my bill electronically. I don’t understand why anyone would sit down and write checks for everything, but I also understand that not everyone frickin’ loves doing as much as possible with as little effort as possible like I do. 