This change is one I resisted for quite a long time. Now I wish I hadn’t! Friends used to joke that I’d be the last person left in North America paying my utility bills with paper checks.  Yes, until very recently I wrote out checks for all the monthly utility bills, car payments, insurance, everything, every month, and it was a big, fat, project that I dreaded. So, I put off it as long as possible each month.  

A year or so ago I made a switch on the mortgage. We’re paid biweekly, by direct deposit, on a Friday. I set it up with the mortgage company to automatically deduct half of our monthly payment from our checking account every other Monday. (Which, by the way, means we make a full extra payment in a year.) That was big stuff for me.  But there’s no way I wanted everybody and their dog dipping into our checking account for their piece of the pie. Or so I thought.

Finally I sat down and worked it through. And it was so easy. Nobody gets paid until I hit the ’send’ button – but that’s all I have to do for all those utilities now, every month. It’s so easy! It took about 1/2 an hour initially to input the names and account numbers that I usually pay into my online banking account. That was it. Entering the amount to pay and the date to pay it takes just a few minutes now, twice a month. Then I print out a page that shows what all I scheduled to be paid, and staple all the bill stubs to that, and put it in a “monthly bills” file. No more stamps, no more running to the post office – one box of checks will last forever – bottom line, I can’t believe I didn’t make this switch a long time ago. Just on stamps and checks I’ll easily save $100 a year, but the bigger savings is time, and it sure cuts down on the paper shuffling too.

So, just in case there’s anyone out there who still is not quite ready to ditch the paper checks, let me just encourage you to give it a try. It’s so much simpler and more efficient . . . and it’s not complicated at all. If I can do it, you can too!