Online bill-paying dumbass

I love online bill pay.

But love will turn on you. And it will be entirely your own fault.

But still, there is the love. Love is blind. Love is stupid.

With bill pay, there is the simple convenience of it. There is the economics of it. (I mean, it's like four bucks in stamps I'm saving every month.) But I particularly appreciate the way it can automatically take care of all fixed monthly payments for the car, the mortgage, insurance and all that.

There is one problem though. Though it is a problem which is entirely user-driven. Sort of by definition really, because the problem is user-error. With so much taken care of automatically, it becomes frightfully easy to forget to take care of things. So for example, having lost the structure of sitting down every month and writing checks, when it comes to my COBRA payments which need to actually go in the mail because they need to be accompanied by an appropriately signed payment slip every month, I tend to well... forget. (Like last month's payment which was 2 weeks late because I didn't remember to send it until some time after we had gotten back from Amsterdam. Whoops.) And it's easy to make typos -- mistype an amount, slip a decimal point, whatever. And when you're in a hurry because you've just remembered to make a payment at the last minute so you quickly jump online to take care of it, it's easy to just go through the motions and click through all the confirmations.

Perhaps you can see where this is going?

Because what happens next is that a few weeks later, you can't figure out why your checking account balance is so low. (Especially when you tend to obsessively quickenate. These things just don't happen.) And it's all very strange until you look through your payment history and you notice that for some reason you've sent $3500 to Verizon for your residential line.

Dumbass.