Les Jones

I use billpay and love it. The bank that I use lets me schedule payments in advance and to receive electronic bills. So basically, I get an email from the bank saying a bill has arrived and login and schedule to pay it on the due date. My bank will deliver on the day that I tell it to. Other banks will send on the day you specify with no guarantee when it will arrive.

My wife and I use First Tennessee on-line banking as well. I use bill pay for certain things that I can count on being fairly regular like hosting fees. I've also set up friends and business associates as payees for certain things like pitching in on buying things on-line.

Viewing the check images is convenient for having the record, but you can't tell who the payee is at a glance. So I encourage my wife to pay directly or via the card when possible. Being able to export your transaction history as CSV is nice. I like that because I use a little Access database at home to track finances; and I can import the CSV file into it.

Transferring money from one internal account to another is pretty fast, but it takes a long time to show up if you send to somewhere else like PayPal or another bank. All in all though, it's pretty convenient.

I don't use First Tennessee (though I still have like $5.00 or something in a savings account I set up when I was in college there - I get the occaisional account statement from them) but do use on line banking with my local bank and have used it in the past with Satan (Bank America).

Anyway, my only word of advice is that while its very convienient and can save you money on stamps and checks, do not assume that the payments are made automatically when you hit the "send" button. Rather, while some are done through electronic transfers (if the bank has an agreement with that particular company) most payment services simply print out a check and then proceed to mail the check in for you. Therefore, in paying your bills, you should factor in one business day to print the checks out, 2 days in the mail, and 1-2 days to process them on the back end. Generally, I give it about a week total before most vendors actually credit your account.

paper is so 20th centry.

that is all the reaons i need.

the few problems i have had with paying bills on line are really hard to clear up, but i have few problems.

I have seen a friend get back multiple checks because they were ripped up by the US postal service.