Basic Finance Care Finance tips
This article gives you a few methods by which you may pay your bills online. This is an alternative to methods such as via the phone, post or in-person payment.
Try your bank first and foremost. They offer quite a few ways to pay your bills. They have a few tools that you may use online. You also get the added benefit of having the payment appear on your bank statement as going directly from your bank account to the company you wish to pay.
This makes proving that you paid it a lot easier (for if there is trouble with the company you are paying), and it makes it easier to prove to Uncle Sam that you are not making any accounting errors. Otherwise, the tax people will write a custom essay on every un-provable expense.
You may set up a direct transfer with most banking online services. This is where you input who to pay, when to pay them, and what amount to pay them. All you then need to do is action the transaction and you are done. In many cases you are also able to make this a recurring action. You can set a date and have it come out on that date every month.
This is similar to setting up a “Direct debit” with your bank. In this case you give your permission to allow a certain amount of money to come out of your bank each month. The difference with a direct debit online payment method is that it is more flexible. You can give permission to allow varying amounts to be removed on a regular basis. You may also specify an end date, upon which the direct debt cancels itself.
One common way of paying online is via the website of the company you wish to pay. There are a lot (a very lot) of payment methods that a company may set up, in order to receive payment online. Your primary concern should be to check to see if their chosen payment method is secure. You will need to research into their payment method and see if it has all of the telltale signs of being secure.
If you are still not 100% convinced then sign up for a credit card that has protection integrated into it. There are some credit cards that will return your money if it is removed fraudulently. Use your credit card to pay via their website and your money will be a little safer. There are a lot of payment methods an online company may choose in order to take payment online. Most of them (probably all) will involve taking a few of your card details, and your registered billing address.
You may pay a bill online by using a third party site. These websites allow you to upload money from your bank account in order to create a balance. You may then use that balance to pay bills online. People pay bills in this manner because it often involves no need for entering your card details to the many websites/companies you pay.
You only need add your card details to the third party site. So if we assume that your details are safe, a third party website may be used to pay your bills online. If the billing company tries to withdraw more than your balance, you are able to put a block on there so that they cannot. You also get the added benefit of being able to pay via means a simple as entering your email address and password.
You may wish to pay your bills online using offline payment vouchers. This is where you buy a voucher from a shop and then enter the vouchers details online. The payment method was used quite a bit during the early days of mobile phone pay-as-you-go plans.
They are not seen as often these days, but you will find that they are still a viable payment option online. They are often seen for people who wish to purchase pay-as-you-use mobile internet, or by people who are not comfortable with entering any bank/pre-payment/credit card details online. It will involve going to a store and buying a voucher, however all that you need to enter to pay (in most cases) is the voucher number.
