Best of Web: credit card management

Home » Columnists » Calvin Ross

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Comment

The Family Computer

When we look at what we can now do on the World Wide Web, which far exceeds our wildest dreams ten years ago, we’d be hard pressed to find a bigger breakthrough than credit card management.

Some technology complicates more than it simplifies. A perfect example was the early versions of Quicken, which automated reconciling your checkbook. Did we need a computer to do that? How about a pencil?

Technology has come a long way, and so has the Web. I’m thankful for the services it offers, and I’m most grateful for credit card management and online bill paying.

Coming back from Tokyo, Japan, back in 1990 — one year after the Web was invented and well before it was any force at all — I was strictly a cash man and proud of it. The Japanese carried wads of cash around in their relatively safe country, and credit cards were a no-go there. Plus, it took up to a ten-day wait to cut a simple check.

Nowadays I think of the cash in my wallet as my emergency stash. Checks are snail cash, and paying by credit card is so automated.

But I still hate paying bills. So the convenience of paying all the credit card bills online, while saving on postage, too, is huge. It’s a ritual that I actually enjoy, setting up the payment to coincide with my automatic paycheck deposit, another innovation from the 90s that’s now taken for granted.

It’s not just the convenience but the paper-saving that I find so gratifying. Setting up your account as a paperless one is an important step that I recommend to all. Usually there is more than one setting to change. It’s important to make sure that you aren’t receiving e-mail alerts but still receiving snail mail versions, too. Sometimes you can arrange for all paper documents to go away, but unfortunately companies still insist on sending all those promotions to get you to take advances or transfer balances. I wish they’d just knock it off.

I take pride in the fact that I no longer write any checks except for rent, which is one of two bills each month I haven’t automated. The other is the garbage bill on my rental home in Portland, Oregon. Landlords by state law have to pay it, and it’s not yet automated.

But the day is coming. Imagine how far we’ve come. When we shop online, at eBay, Amazon or dozens of other stops, we can pay via credit card or PayPal, and then set up an automated pay system. Our goods arrive in the mail.

Both my Comcast cable and my Blockbuster are also set to auto-pay. Come to think of it, so are my insurance payments. And let’s not even get started in this column about investments, but I will stipulate I handle 100 percent of them online, too. I personally fancy Ameritrade, having used that firm for a decade now. Online banking and CDs are breeze.

A warning, though: Just because it’s easy to automate your credit card bill-pay and turn off paper statements doesn’t mean you should stop reviewing your charges, if only to keep an eye out for fraud. I’ve caught online fraud a couple of times and got the charges reversed.

No comments posted.

Join the conversation

*Member ID:
*Password:
Remember login? (requires cookies)
	Forgot Your Password?

Create an account

Comment Guidelines

The goal of the story comments section at NapaValleyRegister.com is to have an open, thought-provoking, civil community forum for all issues.

What gets your comment posted?

• Staying on topic

• Keeping your comment to 300 words or less

• Avoiding name-calling

• Addressing your comments to the message rather than the messenger

What gets your comment deleted?

• Personal attacks

• Derogatory remarks

• Name-calling of any sort

• Going off-topic

• Hate speech

• Racially-insensitive comments

• Implying guilt of a subject in a crime story before there is a court verdict

• Posting e-mail addresses

• Posting comments of a commercial nature

• POSTING WITH ALL CAPITAL LETTERS

• Linking multiple comments together with "to be continued..." to get around the 300 word limit.

The fine print

- Comments are either approved or denied. We do not edit comments.

- You are welcome to modify and resubmit a denied comment.

- Comments may take several hours to be posted.

- Comments posted are those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of NapaValleyRegister.com, its employees or its parent company.

- Do you have information on a story? Please go to our virtual newsroom to send us a news tip.

- If you feel a posted comment has violated our guidelines, please contact online@napanews.com or add a comment indicating you have an issue and our moderators will review the comment in question.

Search: