Saying that it's cheaper to pay on-line is a load of crap. It's more convenient is all. We can help the USPS get back on it's feet by choosing to mail in our bills instead of paying on line. I know I'm only a gang of one but STARTING TODAY MY BILLS WILL BE MAILED IN.
I got a tutorial on "paying the bills" by the Minister of Household Finance. What I was told is that many credit card companies, as a result of these mandates from Congress, will do all sorts of nefarious things to get long time, good, solid customers in the high risk pool.
One favorite trick is to move around the grace period. No big deal, just don't do automated bill paying dates and monitor the fine print on all correspondence from these entities.
Another trick is to say that the payment must be "credited to your account" before such-and-such date or they will throw you in the high risk pool and you watch your interest rate shoot up into pawn-shop usury levels. No big deal for those who never run a balance, until that one payment is "lost" in the mail room.
The point being, and I am trying to be respectful here, you are a complete fool if you mail in your payments. There are just too many points of failure along the way. The USPS can lose or delay your mail since there is no guarantee of delivery; the brute animals these companies employ to tear open envelopes and type into data terminals is a huge point-of-failure that can be easily avoided by going on-line.
It has been long known that mail-room employees at certain credit-card payment reconciliation centers will deliberately delay the recording of a payment. The date for when the payment is "registered" might be the 15th and your mail was received on the 7nd yet a couple days might go by before that mail-room clerk actually gets around to typing in the account data and then there is a delay as your bank actually clears that check. A credit card company might lose a couple days of float holding your check, but in return for this "investment" they get a late payment and now you watch your interest rates double or triple. Damned good ROI in a market that pays < 1%.
So it is always a good idea to manage your accounts by paying close attention to the due dates and making your transaction as simple as possible with as few human interactions as possible. You don't lose a payment check on the internet.
The point I was trying to make was about saving jobs. Wiki states that over 500k americans are employed by USPS. Veterans and disabled veterans included. I’ve been around long enough to know that the postal system is not perfect and yes our mail does get lost or delayed. The internet is no perfect delivery system either (Hackers). Again, I’ve been around long enough to know what the Black Hats can do. My point is that I don’t want to have 500k+ employees applying for unemployment and if going back to snail mail will help prevent it, then that’s what I’m going to do