Mary Pilon looks into three all purpose online bill-paying services. They might make it easier to pay your bills on time, but they don't make paying them less painful.
Online bill paying has certainly made a nagging monthly chore easier. But there's still usually multiple Web sites to juggle -- and passwords to remember.
Now, there are several services that promise to consolidate your bills and let you pay them all in one place. We tested three services to see if they could streamline our tasks: Quicken Bill Pay, PayTrust and MyCheckFree.
There certainly seems to be a market for such services. A 2007 survey from Harris Interactive and the Marketing Workshop found that those surveyed pay on average 11.5 bills a month. Seventy-four percent of surveyed households pay at least one bill online. And on average, respondents said they spend about two hours a month dealing with the logistics of paying bills.
Quicken Bill Pay ( quickenbillpay.com ) is a product of Intuit's Quicken money-management system. It costs $9.95 a month for the first 20 payments, allowing you to route 10 different bank accounts through Quicken Bill Pay. Additional sets of five payments are $2.49 per set. And there's a 30-day free trial for up to 20 payments.
You can also use Bill Pay with the desktop version of Quicken software, a program to track bills, spending and saving plans. If you do, you get some extra features with Bill Pay. (Our tester already had the desktop software.) That desktop software costs between $49.99 and $139.99 and is available in a CD-ROM version or for download directly from the site.
Setting up the account took us almost half an hour -- and we had to enter a ton of information. By the time we found our checkbook with our account number and the addresses and information of all the payees (the company or person you owe money to) -- the Web site had already timed out, and we had to log back in. It then took two more days for Quicken to verify our checking account.
Once we set everything up, it was fairly easy and convenient to pay all of our bills, including our two credit cards and our cellphone bill. It also allows you to schedule payments up to one year in advance so you don't miss any payments. However, we couldn't pay our cable and electricity bills because those accounts are in our roommate's name.
We liked the financial overview set-up of the Web page that let us keep constant tabs on our "cash flow center." The site monitored the amount in our checking and savings accounts and the amount owed on credit cards and "property and debt" to calculate the bottom line: our up-to-the-minute net worth.
PayTrust ( paytrust.com ), another product of Intuit, has three different services for paying bills: Total Bill Management ($12.95 per month for 30 transactions), PayAnyone ($2.95 per month for no free transactions) and PayAnyone plus E-bills ($4.95 per month for no free transactions). Additional transactions under any of the three plans cost 50 cents. (Receiving and paying a bill each counts as one transaction).
We received an email each time a new bill came in. That got a little annoying, since we were also getting notice emails from each of our payees as well. The service allows you to manually approve bills or set up automatic payments. A neat feature: You can set up payments for a range of debts, including babysitters and loan payments to friends. When we had problems setting up our account, customer service solved our issues over the phone in less than five minutes.
You can also export your payment information to online bill-managing programs or order a CD of your bills for recordkeeping purposes.
MyCheckFree ( mycheckfree.com ) allows users to pay bills from over 400 different providers. But that didn't include our bank, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. or our student-loan lender, SLM Corp., commonly known as Sallie Mae. MyCheckFree charges no fees for the site, but Lori Stepp, a spokesperson, says there's a chance that your bank might charge you to use the service.
The site did carry our cable company and our power company. But since those bills were not in our name, we couldn't add them to our MyCheckFree profile -- and thus couldn't pay them via the service.
Paying for newspaper subscriptions and cellphone service is an option through MyCheckFree, but users need to have their account number handy. It was easy to pay our Macy's credit card bill. We just needed to give our credit card number.
Overall, the site was easy to navigate. But since it didn't allow us to make payments on our regular credit card or our student loan, we didn't find it all that useful. In response, Ms. Stepp said that she encourages consumers to pay bills through their bank if it's easier, but that MyCheckFree can save bill payers the headache of "having to remember 10 different passwords for 10 different sites."
Whether you choose to pay your bills with a service or on your own, the fact remains -- you still have to pay them.
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| Type | Today | Week Ago |
|---|---|---|
| 15 Year Fixed | 4.62%  |
4.67% |
| 30 Year Fixed | 5.15% | 5.15% |
| 1 Year ARM | 3.48% |
3.51% |
| 5/1 Year ARM | 3.62% |
3.68% |
| Type | Today | Week Ago |
|---|---|---|
| Line of Credit | 4.89%  |
4.88% |
| 10 Year Loan | 7.47% | 7.47% |
| 15 Year Loan | 7.61% |
7.60% |
| Type | Today | Week Ago |
|---|---|---|
| Interest Checking | 0.28% | 0.28% |
| Money Market/Savings | 0.38% | 0.38% |
| 12 Month CD | 1.13%  |
1.15% |
| 60 Month IRA CD | 2.40% |
2.41% |
| Type | Today | Week Ago |
|---|---|---|
| Cash Back Cards | 12.66% |
12.68% |
| No Annual Fee Cards | 12.08% |
11.97% |
| Reward Cards | 12.75% |
12.61% |
| Small Business Cards | 11.01% |
10.94% |
| Student Cards | 13.77% |
13.49% |
| Platinum Cards | 12.26% |
12.11% |
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Let me add some perspective as someone who was a Paytrust customer for nine years, using the full bill management service. The bill management service sounds great in theory. But it requires that all of your billers start sending their paper bills to South Dakota.
In reality, not all of your billers are going to send their bills to a P.O. Box in South Dakota. Can you blame them? So you will still get some paper bills at home -- in my experience, about 50% of them.
Second, bill paying via Paytrust isn't that much faster. You will need to pull up the scanned bill, and check the billing address against the billing address you entered into Paytrust. The billers can, and do, change their payment addresses fairly frequently. Paytrust will not catch that -- you will need to do so.
Third, some billers will send electronic bills, and maybe even prefer that. But many banks and credit unions offer FREE online bill paying services, that will aggregate the electronic bills too.
The reader should also be aware of Paytrust's billing and penalty fee policy. Understand that when Paytrust wants to be paid, it doesn't bill you like everyone else -- it will write an electronic check to itself in your name, on your bank account. In doing so, Paytrust does not check to see what your balance is. If the electronic check bounces, Paytrust will charge you an NSF fee of $20, and your bank will charge a fee of its own. After the first NSF transaction, Paytrust will not stop writing checks to itself. It will do it two more times, and then will freeze (or "block" in Paytrust lingo) your account.
So, do you want to put your bank account in the hands of an outfit that will write rubber checks in your name repeatedly, after it already knows that there are insufficient funds? That prospect might seem remote. However, for me after nine years with them, it happened because I switched banks, and even though I had set up my new bank as a second funding account with Paytrust, and there were ample funds there.
Oh well. The next thing is that their website represents that if you want to cancel, they will write to all of your billers to switch them back to your home address. Only that is no longer true. They don't provide that service anymore.
Bottom line: use the free online bill paying service by your bank or credit union, if you can. The savings in fees and penalties over the years will be substantial.
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