Day Two - E-Banking

NO MORE PAPER INVOICES!

Welcome to Day Two of my quest! Today's contribution to a greener me is e-banking. Fortunately, I have been doing a lot of my banking online for years, but now I'm upping the ante. In addition to PAYING my bills online, I am now going to be RECIEVING my bills online (at least the ones that are set up to handle this). I found that out of the 18 regular monthly bills we recieve, seven of them will e-bill. Oddly enough, two of those will e-bill me, but will also continue to mail me a bill (WHY?!?!?! Wouldn't they like to save some postage?!?!). I also changed my banking preferences so that I no longer recieve monthly statements for my three bank accounts.

You may think this is a little thing, but for someone with an accounting background, this was a pretty big blow for me. I ADORE keeping my little banker boxes of filed and alphabetized bills and statements. The geek in me is really crying over this one. It's also a pretty big leap of faith -- putting all my trust in the computers, that nothing will get missed, no statement misplaced, no marks on my credit.

SAVINGS:

Well, let's see here.... 7 monthly invoices plus 3 monthly statements, averaging four 8x11 sheets each, plus an envelope (usually the kind with a PLASTIC window and you know how I feel about PLASTIC). Thats 40 sheets of paper and 10 envelopes per month. In one year, that's a savings of 480 sheets of paper and 120 envelopes. Basically, one ream of paper and one box of envelopes... Not huge, but SOMETHING!

DIFFICULTY LEVEL: 1 out of 5

OK, so it makes me a little anxious, but really this took all of 10 minutes of my time. I did it all sitting on my butt right here. If you haven't checked out e-banking, talk to your local bank. Almost every bank and credit union offers it, most of it for free. In fact, it's usually cheaper to e-bank, because you don't pay postage on payments and don't have to buy checks!