PC utilities forum: See you later snail mail, hello online bill paying! Advice needed.

My area of New England just in the last 6 months has experienced over two weeks of outages - then how do you pay your bills online? The mail kept coming, even if I didn't have a light bulb to read them by.
Paper is proof.
No way am I ever going to pay online.

Quicken purchased Mint.

I agree 100 percent. And those who think they save time or take "the easy way", Lol..
Are just jeopardizing the rest of us. And USPS is also another line of defense to theft privacy and such.
Paper is proof, your reference numbers and emails and such are not nearly as reliable.
And lets not forget about customer service/ live person. Always takes longer online, they pretty much never
understand your problem etc et-cetra.

The USPS is a line of defense? Huh? How many checks, credit cards, and identity theft do you think occur from stolen mail? Unless you are some union postal worker worried about downsizing on-line bill pay is the safest, easiest, and most reliable way to pay bills. You pay the day you make it, get confirmation email, reference numbers, and amount paid. What more do you need? I have never had any problem what so ever doing it this way for the last 8 years! Never auto pay, always manually pay close or on the due date. Payment can also be verified on-line if you use your bank or credit card. I can't believe this is even being discused it's so obvious. The fact that some are demanding snail mail is shocking. These probably are from the same crowd that demand the actual physical check is returned to them each month.

I hate to say but even your mail can be stolen. I have a "community mail box" where everyone's mail is a box but it is all together. I have gotten different people's mail on many occassions. I take it to their place personally instead of throwing it away or whatever else other people do. I have seen people's mail left out there in the open. So easy for anyone to open it and get info. If you have single mail box anyone can go by and open it unless you have a lock on it and a small slot so the mail can be dropped in.

I have had my credit card number stolen and it wasn't done online either. They stole my number when I gave someone my credit card to pay for something. Thankfully I had gone to the credit card site to look at my account for something and saw a purchase of $1000! Now I scratch off the 3 digit code on all my credit cards and I write it down and keep it in a safe place.

Remember that thieves don't need much to go open an account in your name or even get a new social security card in your name. You just can't trust anyone

I've had more payments lost by USPS AND bills lost by USPS than ever online. I'd much prefer to receive online bills and pay online.

if you set up recurring payments it's paid automatically and some banks would also receive the bills (if you select that option) and pay the monthly amounts.
One advantage of online bill pay is that you do not HAVE to do check spend time looking at the bill and managing the payments every month. Automation does all of that for you, you just have to make sure you have funds in your account.,

Have you heard of auto bill-pay? Pay everything with a credit card and set up auto bill-pay with your bank.
By the way, a generator will provide electricity.
Do you have a web-enabled phone? Think about using it.

Most of our bills are a fixed or predictable amount. Even utilities have budget plans. Set your bill pay to pay the bill every month a day or two after your direct deposit arrives. Now it gets paid on time and who needs any electric? You can go in to your bank branch (or use the phone banker) to change payment amounts or dates of payment. Electronic banking is how you get your direct deposit on time every month. I didn't trust it at first either 10 years ago, but it works quite well. BobZ

Always use a bank/credit union that will only accept pay request from vendors who you personally setup at that institution. I say this because it is possible for banking criminals to gain access through your computer or even the vendor's business to setup payments electronically if the financial institution doesn't have these rules. I have to personally show up at my credit union and give them the account number of the business I wan't paid; and then they will accept auto pay request from them.

Another factor in this is called session riding. No matter how secure you think your computer is, without certain software solutions, the crooks could ride your browser session into the bank through the SSL secure connection without knowing any password; they simply inject themselves into the browser after you login to the bank! Rapport is the only utility I know that can prevent this. Using these three utilities can help protect you even if you are infected, so I won't list any anti-virus or anti-malware although any sane person would use them too:

1. Rapport - blocks session riding, and unauthorized manipulation of the browser or injection attacks upon it, including key-logging.

2. Keyscrambler - blocks all know methods of keylogging at near the kernel level and prevents screen capture or remote surveillance.

3. LastPass or other password vault - keeps your personal information encrypted on the hard drive and/or makes it available from the cloud over SSL / SSH secure connection. These types of handy utilities will even generate a strong password so you won't have to remember them; but you must keep one VERY strong password for the master logon. This must be entered manually - there is more granular control after that.

These kinds of solutions don't need to constantly update because they are not dependent on signatures or other obsolete technologies. They all have a very good reputation in the IT industry and regularly receive rave reviews from security bloggers and researchers. CNET also has good reviews for other HIPS based malware fighting utilities that don't require signatures to do quite a bit of good defeating even the newest Zeus trojans and other emerging threats.

I'm the same as you, I pay all my bills through my bank's web site, it's secure and I have a record of all my payments. I can also transfer money from one account to another as well as other people's accounts in Australia as well as overseas and I'm 100% happy with this system. I've been doing this for 10 plus years and never had one problem

Looking back at these few post I don't see the quote email money but in a way that is what PayPal does.
You can also do a bank acount to bank acount money transfer online as well as in bank (My acount to Your acount type). Most if not all banks charge a fee.

If you have a reasonably working extra computer that you are not using, I would suggest formatting it and using it SOLELY for your online banking and purchase and do not attach it to your home network. This is what I use my old computer for. That's all it does is online banking, bill paying. This will cut down dramatically on risking exposure to bugs. virii, malware and whatnot so you are extra secure for your transactions.