With the continued growth of technology and the convneience of the internet bill paying can almost be automatic these days. After taking over the finances a couple of months ago I recently decided to start paying as many of our bills online as possible. I was excited to see last month our electric company sent out an email to its customers stating we can now enroll in automatic bill pay. Another bill that will pay itself every month and all I have to do is keep an eye on the online checking account statement.

My excitement was quickly detured however when I tried to set up payments with my mortgage company. When we purchased our house about 2.5 years ago we did and 80/15/5 piggyback loan to avoid PMI. We paid down 5% took out a fixed rate home equity loan for 15% and did a traditional 30 year fixed rate mortgage for the other 80%. This helped us avoid paying PMI and gave us a slightly lower monthly payment. I now regret this decision, but that’s another story.

Anyway, back to my dissapointment with our mortgage company. I don’t necessarly want to setup and automatic payment with our mortgage company becuase I always like to pay a little over on the balance each month. However, I would like to pay the payment online to avoid spending money on a stamp and I can pay at my convenience. However, when I logged into our online account the other day and tried to pay our cuerrent payment online but quickly realized there was a $12 fee to pay online if you don’t have a bank account set up with this financial institution. How crazy is that?

I’m not sure if this is a way they plan to make more customers switch to them to do their normal banking or if its just another way for the mortgage company to take advantage of their customers. Either way I was not happy with the situation as I wrote out my monthly check and wasted another stamp and envelope. Seems to me like it would be much easier on them as well to pay the bill online. Nevertheless, looks like I’m stuck paying this one by snail mail for a while.