One of my coworkers is continually amazed by the fact that I still use checks for a good portion of my bills. Over the past few months, I've been migrating more toward online payments, but I've come to realize that like many things related to money, emotions and habits sometimes trump logic.
I've been running up against some of those emotions and habits, and trying to balance my personality against being illogical.
Just can't shake that feeling
Although I'm pretty young, personal computers were not a common sight in homes and schools until I was in about 5th or 6th grade. When my grade went to the mock city field trip in elementary school, where we had a mayor and businesses and had to learn how to work together to run the mock city, I worked at the faux bank. Everything was still based on ledgers and paper records, and a checkbook balanced by hand. I now use a computer for many things, but some of those early habits are imprinted on my mind.
If I haven't put an envelope in the mail, I have the disconcerting feeling that a bill is unpaid. This habit has served me well for many years, in which I rarely missed a payment due date. Now that I pay bills with money already set aside from a previous paycheck, that feeling has been particularly hard to shake,
Early days of online banking
I've been using online banking for more than a decade, and my Quicken file goes back to 1999. When online bill pay first came about, all it entailed was the bank printing and mailing a check for you. It hadn't evolved quite enough to be completely reliable -- checks would take days to arrive and heaven help you if something got lost in the mail. I trusted myself more than the bank, so I mailed my own checks.
Once electronic transfers became more common, I started using bill pay more often. When my husband and I moved in together, the joint account we opened happened to be at a bank with a terrible online bill pay interface (we both already had individual accounts at that bank, so it seemed easiest). So I slid back into writing checks more often. If I used online bill pay, it was most often through the web site of the company we owed.
Mailing payments has just gotten too expensive
With stamp prices rising almost every year, my check writing has come under scrutiny. While I will always write a check to the IRS and our garbage company isn't set up for online payments, I will be moving toward online payment as much as possible. Strangely, for one of my credit cards, I can only make payments from the associated bank account. So if I want to pay for that card from any other account, I have to first transfer money into the associated bank account and then to the card. Which is way too many transactions to enter in Quicken, so I will probably stick to checks for that.
Speaking of checks, I was cleaning out a bag and found a box of checks. I have another box of checks with almost all the same check numbers. That means I was an idiot and bought a box of checks I didn't need to because of disorganization. We all have our faults, and I now have added incentive to make the checks last as long as possible.
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