As I write each one of my blog entries, under the title there’s a selection for category, so I feel like I should fill that out each time even though I’m sure no one goes through my entries based on category. This categorization process seems to be the hardest part about writing a blog entry once I finally sit down to do it. I had no idea where to put this one, so it ends up under Computers and Internet because I’m going to talk about my affection for the bill pay service.
About four times I year, I have so much paper pile up around my desk that I decide it’s time to go through all of it, update all my balances on different accounts and file all my old bills. It usually takes about 3-6 hours and tonight has been no exception. The following are random thoughts I had while burying the kitchen counter temporarily in paper.
First, I should mention that I saved a lot of money on my car insurance this weekend, and not by using a discount broker. I’ve priced out Geico and used Progressive and most recently Esurance for my car insurance. Esurance decided to jack up my rates $150 per 6 months for no reason, so I decided to take another look around. I insured my house with a local broker because I needed the coverage during the contruction loan period and no one else seemed to offer that. So they’ve been pinging me to do my car insurance as well. I’ve put them off until now, but when they gave me a quote, it was not only cheaper that my latest Esurance quote, but $60 cheaper than what I had been paying everything 6 months. Then they gave me $120 off my home insurance per year. Why didn’t I make the switch earlier?
I have fallen in love with BillPay. I have been using it for 4-5 years to pay my mortgage which is with the same bank as my checking account. I never really thought more of it until our friend Jill, who goes to our day care, mentioned that she uses it to pay for day care each week. Our typical arrangement has been to write out a check each Friday and hand it to our day care provider as we pick up our kids. It works, but we occasionally forget, and she has to grab the check before her daughters do something with it, so I was looking for a better way. With BillPay, I just went in and scheduled an automatic payment for every week to go to her in the same amount. Now I don’t do anything – she just gets a check in the mail each Thursday with the amount and we don’t have to fiddle with the Friday manual delivery anymore. Now tonight, I just used it to pay for Katie’s preschool – I made 9 payments starting in late August through March of next year, without worrying about checks or paying in advance or anything. That was pretty slick. I think I’ll pay all my bills this way from now on. Katie might be sad that there won’t be anymore "sticker projects" (when I ask her to put stamps on my bills), but with the rate for stamps going up again anyway, I can live with not having to buy more stamps.
I got 2 crowns on my teeth this week. I had the original visit about 3 weeks ago where they stripped off most of my tooth and placed temporary crowns on and then got my "bling" this week. It was not an enjoyable experience, as you could imagine, and not a cheap experience either. My insurance paid for half and I still had to come up with $800 for this. I’m sure now that the dentist knows I can afford these crowns, he’s going to come up with another one for me to get very soon.
One other random item – I get so much mail from different mutual companies and different brokerages about monthly summaries and annual updates. Why don’t they just give me their website and some login credential and let me get this info when I want? How many trees do we have to knock down so I can get the Q3 quarterly update on the Oakmark Fund which I barely remember that I have? I suppose there’s some opt-out thing I can do to stop getting those, and if so, please let me know what it is so I can get rid of a filing cabinet at my house.
One other thing that was in my pile o’ file was some ancestry info my mom gave me a few months back. When I first started this blog, I really planned to use it as an outlet for the ancestry stuff I had figured out, but I’ve gotten nowhere on that task. Hopefully I get to that at some point. Maybe that should be on my new year’s resolutions for next year so I can work on it next winter.
Eric's space 