While signing up with an inter-mediary is somewhat more costly, the benefits are significant and warrant your further investigation. Go to www.paytrust.com and click on "Learn more."
Pay through an Internet portal. Websites including Yahoo!, MSN and Quicken act as Web portals for online bill payments to hundreds of entities. And most of them offer the service for free for limited services.
Here is an example: Quicken partners with 250 different merchants and companies for its online Bill Pay service and charges consumers $9.95 a month for up to 20 payments, with a $.50 per transaction cost for each additional payment.
Many Internet portals used to cut paper checks to pay your bills meaning you would have to request payment well in advance of your due dates. But now they make electronic payments which decreases that time frame.
Each portal handles bill paying a little differently, so you need to check out each one, if for no other reason than to learn all of your options.
Yahoo! Log on to www.yahoo.com. Scroll down to the bottom of the home page and look for Personal Finance then click on "Bill Pay." Now you will see an option to "Take a tour." Do that.
MSN. Log on to www.msn.com and click on Money in the second section of menu items on the left. Now look down to find Banking and Loans, then Bill Pay. You can also take a tour of this service. MSN offers two levels of online bill paying-Premium and Standard with monthly fees ranging from $2.95 to $5.95 per month, with conditions.
Quicken. You may recognize Quicken as the software provider, and while you can pay your bills online using your Quicken software that also manages our checking account, you can skip the software and now use Quicken Bill Pay through its Internet portal. Log on to www.quicken.com and click on Quicken Bill Pay on the right. One advantage of Quicken is that it allows you to make payments from up to ten different bank accounts. The monthly cost is about $9.95. Quicken offers your first month free. Quicken guarantees on-time payments or they'll reimburse your late fee up to $50, if your payment arriving late was their fault.
America Online. AOL Bill Pay, offered to members at no extra charge, is provided through an AOL alliance with Yodlee.com, a company specializing in online personal finance services.
AOL members (only U.S. members at this time) who sign up for AOL Bill Pay receive summaries of their online bills through AOL email messages, from where they can link directly to the supplier websites to make their payments. See your AOL membership site for full details.
