Is convenience worth the cost?

This has been a mental "blog in process" for the last couple of days and I think I have my thoughts organized enough to put it into words. If not, I will just wing this one haha.

The economic strain across the country is being felt by all. I hear people all the time wondering how we got to this point. Everybody is looking for someone to blame when the truth of the matter is we, as a society in whole, are ALL to blame.

We live in a world of advanced technology. Just about every company offers online bill payments. Some charge a fee for this process while others do not. But are those that claim to be "free" providing this "no charge" service for us the consumers or for the "fat cat" executives own benefit? Let's make up a hypothetical family and look at the real costs involved:

Sally & John Smith have 10 household bills that they pay "conveniently" online every month. Of these 10 bills, 5 of them charge a $5 convenience fee for paying online. So they pay out $25 per month to save approximately one hour in writing checks. Actually if you consider the amount of time they have to spend inputting all of the information to pay these bills online, it is not even an hours worth of time. Most people at one time would have said $25 is not a big deal. Today it is a big deal in many households and if you look at the ripple effect this has it becomes an even bigger deal. Over the course of 1 year Sally & John will have paid out $300 in convenience charges! For many of us, that is the equivalent to a full months car payment all because writing out the same information we typed into the computer was too much work!! Had they taken the time to just write the checks and drop them in the mail for the year they would have written 120 checks on these payments and spent $50.40 in postage at the current rate of .42 per envelope. Most places, including banks, charge for check printing. Let's just put a price tag on that of $24.60 per year because I like round numbers haha. Sally & John would STILL have added $225 dollars to their annual budget!!

What we fail to see is the "ripple effect". During this time of huge lay-offs, how much of a role did we play in that? How many people lost jobs because it was "convenient" for us to just pay them online? A company could eliminate a lot of positions in payment posting departments, mailrooms etc. because it only takes 1 person to process electronic payments (if that-most places have computer programs to automatically post your payments) instead of the 5 they had prior to go through all of the mail for the day. This is another reason postage rates are going up and jobs are being lost in that industry. Another huge problem that has emerged as a result of the online frenzy is identity theft. Millions of people are victims of identity theft every year because they responded to phishing e-mails or were hacked as they entered their account information online. Repairing your entire life after having someone steal your identity can not possibly be worth any convenience.

The governments recent solution to this epidemic is the $700B bailout. How is that a solution? You are using my tax dollars to take away from programs that could benefit me and my family in the future to save companies who continue to hand out fat bonuses to their executives while the employees who made the company successful for so many years in the past are standing in the unemployment line?? Those tax dollars spent to help the ailing companies will not be replaced any time in the near future until we force corporate america to provide jobs.

So the next time you get the urge to grumble about writing a check and consider paying it online stop and think. How many families will you be helping if you just write the check and drop it in the mail? How much money can you potentially keep in your own pocket by NOT paying the service charge for that online payment?