My SO pays the bills and takes the money for my share from my account. I don’t think he really has a record keeping system.
I do just about all my banking online. I’ve gone paperless for most of my utility bills, and may do it for my credit cards one of these days (I’m already paying them online. About the only checks I write are things I couldn’t do online, like the rent payments. I did just make my first mortgage and HOA payments by check, since I hadn’t yet set up the former for online payments and the latter doesn’t have an online option. The HOA has an automatic draft arrangement, which I may look into.
I have a friend who still pays most of his bills by check, because he doesn’t want anyone to have information on his bank accounts. He does track his credit cards online, though.
Online here too. I have the option of receiving “paperless bills” through my bank, which means they’ll alert me about a week or so in advance of an upcoming bill. I have a checking account that I only use for these online transactions and nothing else.
The only “hard” checks I write are for the town (property, water, excise).
My statements are also online, as well as back/front copies of “hard” checks.
I’d say 50/50 by direct debit and online
Matter of fact I receive very few bills via snail mail, I just get an email telling me that I can now view my latest whatever it is.
I dunno about other countries but we get a discount of between 6%-9% for going paper free
I think I’m finally at a point where I’m paying all of my bills online, either through debit card or electronic funds transfer. I don’t use my credit union’s bill paying service, though: I still prefer to go to each account’s web site and pay there. I give my SO a paper check each month for my part of the mortgage and power bill (he prefers a check to a transfer), but otherwise I think that even all of my magazine subscriptions can be paid/renewed online these days. Most of my bill notices are also electronic, but the ones that aren’t get shredded after they’ve been paid. If I get a payment confirmation via email I file it (put it in a folder/label called “Payments”), and I keep those until it occurs to me to go through them and delete old ones. The bill notices get deleted as soon as they’ve been paid. For taxes, my company offers electronic W2s. I file my taxes online, and get my refunds direct-deposited. I print a hard copy of the return, though, and keep that as one of my few paper files.
I did that up until about a month ago, when I decided to start letting Quicken be my checkbook (I’d been using Quicken for years as a “where is my money going” tool, but my entries were often 5-6 months behind). I still “balance” it each month, though. I like knowing that my credit union and I agree on how much money I have. 
The first few times I didn’t record something in my checkbook it felt very weird, but I’m used to it now. I even finally stopped carrying my checkbook around with me.
Well, “balancing your checkbook” is about more than checking the math - if your records are computerized, the math will be fine. Balancing however does ensure that nothing slips by (unauthorized transactions, specifically).
Anyway: re bills: We do keep paper copies of our Mastercard / Visa bills though I’m leaning toward stopping that since all of ours are now available online - once I verify that they’ll be online for as long as we have the accounts, I may quit keeping the hardcopies. They serve as receipts / backup for a whole slew of things, such as payments to the doctor.
We haven’t gotten hard-copies of our checks in years. We do keep the duplicates, I suppose we could go through and toss anything from 7+ years ago.
For a while when we were first married, Typo Knig was filing away all sorts of things like utility bills. Once I took over the bulk of the billpaying, I put a stop to that. If I need to find what we paid the electric company, I look in the checkbook!
Oh, and we’ve been Quicken-ized since 1999, which is a hell of a lot faster to search through than a stack of boxes.
We do keep old bank statements. I think we may have finally tossed ones from 10+ years ago. We also keep end-of-year statements from the investment accounts.
I pay all my bills online or via telephone - cant be arsed with the effort of going to the bank, rent office, etc to pay them. PLus being a full time student as well as working practically full time I have no time to do these boring jobs. Paperless bills here are also a little cheaper so Im happy to reap such benefits!
We do just about everything online. Direct deposit, bill-pay…the only checks I’ve written this year were for magazine subscriptions. I check everything about once a week, just to be sure I’ve not screwed something up. Or that somebody else hasn’t.
Pre authorised withdrawals from my "Bill acc’t, to a limit, set for each billing party (incase they get hacked, or some such fraudulent thing occurs).
For instance, my Mastercard gets withdrawn on the 16th, but anything over $500 I have to personally authoriuse the next day. (Set this up through a credit union… don’t know if you can do that with a regular bank).
I don’t think I’ve written a cheque in 8-9 yrs… at least…
Regards
FML
Online, mostly automatically.
I don’t even understand what “Balancing a checkbook” means. It’s been explained to me but I don’t get what the point is.
That is what I said. I think it is just a feel-good measure for older types. I can just scan transactions online very quickly to see if anything went horribly wrong. It isn’t difficult or time-consuming. I have no idea what I would need to do to do a proper balancing of my checkbook or what the point would be.
Online here. I check the balance with my bank every week just to make sure everything is still in sync.
And yes, I do balance my “checkbook” to the penny every payday. I use my checkbook as more than just a place to record checks…I’ll “hide” money from myself by subtracting it from the total, then adding it back in when I need it. For instance, today, I set aside half the mortgage payment. That money is still in my checking account, but it’s been subtracted from my balance so I don’t have it to spend. Then, when the mortgage is due, I add the money back in and pay the mortgage.
Everything related to our rental property (taxes, insurance), any medical bills, any charitable donations, get thrown into a manilla envelope labeled “Taxes 2008.” Ivylad sorts them out when it’s tax time. The bills that we’ve paid get thrown in a drawer until someone gets bored and wants to do a little shredding.