The Paperless Lifestyle Part 1 – JohnnyB

One of the things that we decided before moving into the RV was to go completely “paperless” with regards to bank statements, bills, receipts, and all manner of paper clutter. For most bills it was easy as we have been using a bill-pay service for the last 10 years. MYEZBills.com, previously known as Status Factory, is not the usual free bill-pay service you get with your bank account but rather a full-service bill pay that costs about $20/mo. Basically you change your billing address to their address, they open your bills, scan them, and the best part: they pay your bills using rules you set! For example, I set the electric bill to be automatically paid 10 days before it is due, as long as it’s under $150. All your bills are paid on-time, every time, with no effort. This is especially important now that we are traveling full-time with mail being forwarded once per week at best. You can set fixed amounts or you can have them pay the minimum payment or you can have them send you an email to manually intervene. And you can view and download all your bills as PDFs on their secure web server and even order an annual CD-ROM for archival purposes. It’s the bomb! All payments are made directly out of your bank account and most of the time it even has the full description of the bill payment on your bank statement, unlike cashed checks which simply show the check number and amount. The only caveat with a service like this is you must maintain an adequate balance in your back account.
In my next post I’ll detail how we went paperless with everything else, including scanning, shredding, online storage, and the all-important regular backup.

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