I picked my mail up from my parents’ house last Thursday and among the various spam, bills, and fan mail, I found my credit card bill. I didn’t get a chance to actually open it up until Friday night. As I perused the charges, I made sure to note when I needed to send it in by since I was several days late the month before last. The very last thing I need is to start getting bad credit because I’m so absent-minded. Of course, the payment due date was for March 11, 2006. For those not keeping track, thats Saturday, as in the next day. Naturally, I freaked out. It was really late at night and was practically Saturday already, so I did what anyone else would have done in my situation. I went to bed.

In the morning, I roused myself to see the bill sprawled across my keyboard, at which point I freaked out again. It was pretty obvious at that point that mailing the check out via snail mail was out of the question and that I somehow needed to make an online payment to my credit card company as soon as possible. I asked a couple of my roommates what they normally do, but that wasn’t terribly helpful since neither had the same credit card company as me. One had the same bank I do and had a good tip for setting up regular payments, but that didn’t really help my immediate need. I gave up and went online to my credit card company’s website and found the online transfer section conveniently labeled “Pay My Bill”, admittedly though I was looking for the tab labeled “Somebody Else Pay My Bill.” One can always hope.

After entering a dubiously small amount of information and specifying the amount I wanted to transfer, the site said the transaction was successful. I had gotten it in by 3pm on Saturday which means its supposed to post that day, allowing my payment be on time. It wasn’t showing up though on the site. I realized there was nothing else that could be done until Monday if it continued to not appear in my account. After about 36 hours of slight panic about it, though I checked the site again and it appeared in my recent activity. Not only that, but it said it was as of the 11th (on time) and no site of any late fees or finance charges. I may need to look into this online banking thing more seriously. It could not have been more convenient and easy to do, unless I had an assistant to pay all my bills for me. One goal at a time.