It used to be my bills showed up in my mailbox (my Canada Post mailbox), I opened them, I piled them up and once a week I’d pay them (on-line). The system worked fine, and was better than the old system of either mailing (Canada Post) cheques out, or going to the bank and paying bills there.
The Barrage of Bill Delivery Mechanisms
In the past few years things have changed, and various firms started offering to send me bills in electronic format. This sounded interesting to me, however, I like my paper bills, and back then e-mail systems were a little flakey (and untrustworthy in my estimation). Then I started getting charged for getting my beloved paper bills, which annoyed the crap out of me, so I started to get some of my bills electronically, which has now created a veritable electronic cacophony of bills.
Allow me to elaborate on the many ways my bills arrive:
- Some bills still arrive in my super mailbox down the road (yes I hate those too)
- Other bills are sent to my e-mail account (I try to have them show up to only 1 account, that way I don’t have to sift through my 15 different e-mail addresses).
- Still othersare sent to my e-post account (from Canada Post)
- An interesting side issue is that I get an E-post account with my TD accounts as well, however, I cannot merge my other E-post account with the TD version, thus the TD version is useless to me.
- Then some bills I have to go to a web site to pick it up (but I get an e-mail to tell me the bill is available)
- Finally other bills send me annoying text messages reminding me about payments due, and some do not
All of this really is getting under my skin, and also has succeeded in making me paranoid because last year for the first time I missed paying more than 4 different bills, which has never happened to me before (usually it is 1 a year). Is this due to the fact that I am barraged with bills from many different sources? Maybe, it could be my advancing age as well, but I keep getting the feeling this “brave new world” may be passing me by, but it is certainly making paying my bills on time a challenge.
The biggest fear that I have is that something happens to me and Lindsay is unable to see the bill notifications. Why these companies can’t have TWO email notification addresses is beyond me. I am reduced to leaving my passwords in an envelope for Lindsay to use in an emergency. (I still have to set that up!)
On the positive side, I no longer have to worry about forwarding our mail to the summer home and I don’t have to worry about a bill being stuck at the alternate mailbox address.
I made the big change following the last mail strike. I had taken a trip where I had succumbed to vertigo on the plane and had to cancel the trip. This left me with a travel claim in which the company re-imbursed me by sending 3 separate checks. Why they couldn’t credit my credit card is a mystery to this day.
The checks were sequential and so were all mailed out on the same day. The first check arrived two weeks after the mail strike ended. The second two weeks after the first and the last two weeks after the second. Total delay was 6 weeks for items all mailed on the same day!
Add this to the inconvenience that we were at the summer home where the nearest branch was 1.5 hours away.
This delay cost me almost $500 in credit charges. After we got back to Ottawa, I started the process of moving everything to electronic delivery.
To this day, I remain a strong advocate of abolishing the post office.