Electronic banking

The Internet has allowed us to do some marvelous things with our money that we used to have to do (gasp) in person. You know, things like deposit payroll checks, pay utility bills, and transfer funds between accounts. Why just recently I moved money from our savings account into 3 CD accounts whose maturity dates were spaced out 3 months apart. I expect a transaction like that in person would have taken a half hour at least instead of the 2 minutes it actually took.

But there is a danger in being too automated. I pay most of my bills through a program called Microsoft Money which has an arrangement with my bank to pay bills through Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) where feasible and by "bank check" when not. I've been doing this for 7 or 8 years. Although we've lived in Sacramento for almost 6 years, these "bank checks" still had our address from Long Beach. Thus, many of the companies I paid through the bank received checks with an address they couldn't match to their records. And since the whole process was automated neither I nor our bank realized the address was outdated. Of course the bank had changed the address of our account years ago but not the address on the automated bank checks.