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.