I pit having to jump through hoops just to pay my bills

The BBQ Pit
41

I have exactly the same setup with a major national brand-name bank. Works great. But one hell of a lot of Americans choose to bank with small town banks, credit unions, etc., which generally lack these features.

For some of the variable bills, e.g. my credit cards, the creditor can even send an “e-bill” directly to the bank telling them how much is the minimum payment and how much is the full pay-off amount and the due date. Once I’ve pre-approved “Pay in full X days before the due date, not to exceed $Y”, that all happens every month without intervention. But again the money flow is still push and I can turn that off reliably at any time.

But of the dozen-ish credit cards I use regularly, only about half of them are able to render e-bills to my bank. For all the others, I get an e-mail and I have to go to the bank’s site/app and manually order it to “pay card X $Y on date Z”. And do the same process again next month. and the month after and …

42

I’ve drifted away from using the banks bill pay feature. I use it to pay one utility bill. I found that it was a bit of a PITA to load and or change addresses/ phone numbers when I opened a new payee account or their mailing address changed

For paying credit cards, I use their app, when I get the statement via email I immediately open the app and set up payment for the due date.

Internet and cell phone are on automatic pay when due as is my health insurance.

The mortgage is at the credit union where I keep my accounts. When due I just make an internal transfer.

43

I don’t know that it’s a “major bank” perk so much as a difference in culture or maybe how businesses are set up or just in which bills a person needs to pay . For example, you mention paying

this way. I don’t have a trash bill, but I paid all of the other bills online and could do so through the bank’s service. - with one exception. The dentist. If I went to a chain/franchise/huge practice dentist , I’m sure I could pay online but I’ve always used solo practitioners , who for the most part didn’t even have a website. I can now pay my PCP copayment online - but only since he sold the practice to a hospital ( he’s still there, but as an employee). My garage landlord- he only rents out three or four garages so he has no website or management company. I theoretically could pay them through Zelle or Venmo but if I want to pay them through my (very large) bank’s online banking, the bank will be mailing them a check. And my credit union isn’t any different.

44

This is how it works for me, paying bills through Citibank. They’ve had electronic bill payment for a long time; at least thirty years or more. As said, most larger companies receive the money via electronic funds transfer but a smaller vendor, like my landlord, might receive payment via a bank check mailed by Citibank. The advantage for me is not to use one of the paper checks that I received when setting up the account and also that the check that’s sent amounts to a bank check, so it’s reliable.

And to everyone who says why is banking in America so screwed up compared to other countries, I think the reason is that America has had national banks for only a few decades. Prior to, I think, reform during the Clinton administration, banks operated only within each of the states.

45

no they don’t, but you’ll most likely have your acct credited back before you could ever get money from your 401(k) & there’s no tax implications for pre-mature withdraw, either.

46

Hope springs eternal. “Dear Bank Mgr, I’ve been hacked”. “Nuh uh”. “Uh Huh”. Lather rinse repeat.

47

I’m with you on this. My credit union makes easy work of being the one to initiate the payments, and I would expect most banks do the same.

I log into my credit union account, click on ‘bill pay,’ and there’s a list of all the people and places I’ve paid through my credit union before. I fill in the amount I’ve been charged next to each payee, click “pay bills,” it shows me the total and the breakdown of those I’m actually paying this month, I click ‘confirm,’ and log out. Done. Takes me a minute or so.

Payees get their money by electronic transfer if they’re bit enough to be set up that way (e.g. Verizon, BG&E) or by paper check (my doctor, my dentist, my HOA) if they’re not. But I don’t have to think about that part; it happens by itself, from my POV.

ETA: Looks like wolfpup and several others have already discussed this.

48

Here in Japan, they also have options for paying a lot of the bills such as utility bills at a convenience store. They send the bill to you, you take it to a convenient store where they scan it and you give them cash.

As you are never more than 200 meters from a convenience store here, it’s not bad.

Taiwan online banking is much more convenient, but my wife did all of that while we lived there.

49

It’s quite obvious you have no clue how the process works. Given it was my job, I do. You’re wrong!

50

I do it exactly the way that you do, through the bank (actually, credit union) website. I’ve done it this way for at least a dozen years. The only difference is I do it via my cell phone most of the time.

If my bank/credit union didn’t offer it, I’d switch to one that did.

51

Compared to banking in Canada, banking in the US is a disorganized clusterfuck for many reasons, including the one you mention. In Canada, with the exception of credit unions and some speciality banks, “bank” generally means one of the Big Five, who operate in a quasi-monopoly in which they are both tightly regulated and also protected by the federal government, and are essentially indistinguishable. The US banking clusterfuck is one of the reasons that it was so far behind the rest of the world with respect to smart chip cards, RFID, and portable POS terminals brought to the table in restaurants.

52

I used to get a water bill, when they came in the mail, where you had to disassemble the envelope the bill came in, turn it inside out and fold this out that and in, and it became the envelope to mail your check back in. Huge pita.

53

I just had a good example of a clusterF …

I have three primary credit cards I use for all my daily expenses, my rent, and as many utilities & such as I can put through them. Two are auto-bill and auto-pay, so I don’t need to do anything, the balance just gets paid off every month with no reason for me to pay any attention at all.

The third doesn’t offer auto-bill. So I have set up monthly auto-pay for a token amount somewhat more than the minimum payment is likely to be. Then when they e-mail me a new bill, I manually update the impending token payment to be the full balance and I’m good for another month. Worst case if I skip the update, they’ll get more than the minimum payment and I’ll pay interest for a month, but not get hit with a late payment penalty, interest rate increase, credit score ding, etc.

So far so ordinary. Until this most recent go-around.

This last card was frauded out last month, and they sent me a replacement card. Ok, that happens a lot. But for reasons unknown, that also stopped the emailing of statements. Which absence I didn’t notice. It was happenstance I was looking at my checking account and considering my next few weeks’ cash flow when I noticed the payment to the card was going out tomorrow and was still for the token amount. Oops.

Jump on the credit card’s website, see the disclaimer about statements being screwed up if your card number changes, update the payment to be the correct amount. To boot, by chance it had been an extra expensive month charged to that card, so the planned token payment wouldn’t have met the minimum payment due. Which would have triggered a late charge, etc.

Phew. Missed me by that much.

Why can’t this be easy and stay easy? Gaah!

p.s. And yes, I have updated the token payment to be bigger. Just in case.

54

Evan though there has been tremendous consolidation among banks over the last few decades, there are still over 4,000 banks in the US. No wonder it’s so hard to get consensus about modernization!

55

What was the fraud and did you figure out how the it happened?

56

Seems a strange question in the modern world.

Somebody other than me attempted a charge against my card. The card company (Citibank, so a biggee) detected that and asked me if I bought $X from merchant Y on date Z. I said “no” and they cancelled the card.

I use that card probably 150 times per month all over the world once you include e-commerce charges. Given that the card info could have been stolen from anywhere any time in the last few years, the idea of me having any idea of how or where it was compromised seems silly to me.

The attempted fraudulent charge was to Amazon, and I do use that card often at Amazon. But I have near zero suspicion that the compromise occurred at Amazon itself. Everyone, even crooks, shop at Amazon.

57

I disagree with that: I think that credit card thieves generally use the information immediately while it is fresh.

As an example of what happened to me is that I stopped for gas at a gas station and the card didn’t work in the pump I tried. I thought nothing of it and moved to a different pump. Within a week or two I was notified of fraud on my card–and concluded it was likely a card skimmer on the pump.

58

Depends on how it happens. When somebody breaks into e.g. Target’s computers and steals hundreds of thousands of credit cards’ info at once, they don’t all get used ASAP. They get sold on and used eventually. OTOH, if somebody skimmed a gas pump, then yeah, it’ll probably be used soon.

Between all the e-merchants who have that card on file for repeat purchases, all the times it gets handed to a wait-person to swipe back at the till, and all the ordinary retailers where it gets used, that card is at the crack ho level of promiscuity. IOW: Gonna catch somethin’ soon.

I have a dedicated card for gas purchases that only gets used for that. Intended to sorta defeat skimmers by isolating that one getting compromised from the rest of my daily spending and stored cards. They’ll still skim it and fraud it out; I just won’t have 20 or 30 websites to visit to update my card number. That works in the sense that when it got skimmed, the isolation was helpful. It fails in the sense the other card(s) get compromised too somehow.