I have been using Yahoo! Bill Pay for almost 10 years.  I do not recall the exact year I started using the service but it was sometime between 1996 and 1998.  The service is actually run on CheckFree technology, Yahoo! just provides an additional access option to Yahoo members.

CheckFree was one of the early entrants into the Electronic Bill Pay(EPB) services.  Over the years I have tried to drop my Yahoo! Bill Pay service twice.  The problem is that I could never find any service that was better through my existing banking options at those times.

Finding and establishing a good Bill Pay Service can only be accomplished if the service functions well with your current bank or credit union.  This assumes that you do not want to change banks, just to find a better payment solution.  In 2001, I considered moving away from Bill Pay to try something new.  I had experienced a few problems, where payments I had entered just disappeared into the system, which is not easy to explain to your creditors. 

Computer glitches have long been a source for excuses to customers but this is not a two way street and banks do not allow customers to get away with a computer error excuse themselves!

In 2001 I established a new account with a credit union run by my new employer at the time.  They offered a free bill pay service. 

Yahoo Bill Pay runs at about $4.95 a month plus per transaction charges if you do more than a certain number of payments per month.  My average bill has been about $6.95 for close to 10 years now.  At the time I figured Free was cheaper than $6.95 a month and started to use the new service.

You Don’t Get What you Don’t pay for

The new service unfortunately did not work as well as Yahoo Bill Pay.  Instead of getting payments to creditors by the date promised, the new service would hold my payments until the credit union had accumulated a batch of transactions from all customers to process.  So if I had a bill to be paid in 5 days, and I entered it to be paid by day 5, it might not get paid.  If the bank’s batch minimum was say 100 payments and my payment was number 1, I would have to wait for 99 more payments to fill up the batch until the credit union started to process the payment, which might happen in an hour, a day or a week.

My creditors definitely did not understand this and neither did I so I dropped this ‘Free’ Payment service and shortly there after my account with the credit union.

Today, I find myself in a similar position.  Yahoo Bill Pay has no customer service.  I do not mean that it is bad, I mean that it does not exist.  The service has been down for 3 days, and my bills, while not late, are not getting paid.  The last thing I want to do is dig my check book out of my safe and dust it off to start writing checks.

So I am in the process of establishing a new Bill Payment service with my current bank.

Forewarned is Forewarned

This time I am prepared for the probability that the new service will not function like Bill Pay.  Right away I see that the new service can pay my credit card bills in 2 days as opposed to Yahoo Bill Pay’s 4 day window.  However, for smaller bills like my student loans or cable company, there is no 2 day transfer.  They dump the transaction into a que for potential electronic payment and if that fails they will mail a check to be there in about 7-10 days. 

This is another free service, so I’m not getting what I’m not paying for again, however, knowing about the potential problems might make things a little easier to cope with  . . . .

This Time!