General Chat

good one Bernie :-),

My elderly mother is not computer literate at all, has no interest in the technical world we live in. When she goes shopping, she will go to an ATM and withdraw cash with her Eftpost card and then go shopping... I have given up trying to understand why she won't use the same card in the supermarket..

I opt for paper statements from the bank. We have to keep them for seven years and I know if I needed to produce a statement for the IRD , the bank would take great pleasure in charging me for searching and printing....

We run a small business and more and more of our mail is becoming electronic. I get a bit miffed when it costs me ink and paper to print invoices out which I then pay .. That said, some of our customers prefer to receive electronic bills from us. Swings and roundabouts - horses for courses :-D,

Dermot, perish the thought we should lose touch with other humans......

To irritate the matter even further, if that is possible, banks & utility companies are regularly pressuring us all to abandon paper billing completely & deal with everything online.

We will soon be hard pressed to be able to produce any original document because there simply won't be any. We are moving inexorably closer to a world without human contact, where we will carry on most of our day-to-day business, except the occasional visit to the pub, without ever laying eyes on another human face.

Very depressing!

Most banks etc., do not do their own 'enveloping' but use an off site clearing house.

I know when I worked for RM we dealt with at least 10 of these type of businesses. They printed and posted work for all major banks and utility companies and all end of year reports.

Was cheaper for all those businesses to get someone else to do it!

Also I like my paperless billing, I was disappearing under a mound of paperwork that I felt I had to keep, and then had to shred (or burn on a bonfire at the right time of year) if I wanted to get rid.

Now I have very little to shred, but nothing leaves this house with any names, addresses, account numbers or barcodes on, it all goes in the shredder. I do spend a little time tearing up letters etc., so I just shred the important bits!!!

I am always amazed when I go to my SIL's and their rubbish is just full of their names addresses etc., I have mentioned it and she just does not seem to be bothered by it. Sadly it will take their ID being stolen before their cavallier attitude is sorted.

Hasn't the bank already covered the cost of the cheque?

I think Florence answered the question when she said "...the cost of printing off bills and paper is quite expensive and to be honest when you have a lot of bills,that takes up time and money producing a copy."

Either each customer opting for paper bills should bear the additional cost compared to paperless billing or the costs should be passed on to all customers in the form of a slight increase in all bills.

Ask yourself this - are you being charged more for opting for physical statements/bills or are you being charged less for opting to go paperless?

Hi Susan,

Just pay by cheque and deduct $1.50 for the 'paper payment'.

;-)

B

And then there are people like me that have to give bank statements, savings account statements, utility bills etc as proof of my address etc to my employer and we don't have a printer.

Well yes ok use the online for access if you are away from home but not sure how far back you can access.

What i meant was if you download a bill and transfer it into a folder, you should save it elsewhere.

Also the cost of printing off bills and paper is quite expensive and to be honest when you have a lot of bills,that takes up time and money producing a copy.

many a time i have had a query with something and so glad i have all my bills for the last 5 years so i could deal with the problem.

banks only provide copies of statements going back 3 years now(used to be 5). if you had a query prior to that it could be difficult to sort out. i had a problem with my NI contributions going back 8 years. They said i had missed payments and owed money. Thankfully i had kept my statements and so proved them wrong. had i not kept them, it would have been so much more difficult to sort out.

Florence
in the hebrides.

PS Having worked 16 years previously in a bank, one thing i learnt was how to file and keep things in order!

You shouldn't need to back up because if you have opted for online banking then you can access the statements from anywhere in the world - far more convenient than having to wait until you get home to find a piece of paper in a filing box - a piece of paper which could go missing.

Well actually I write several letters a month and my aunty and cousin write me at least 3 times in the month. neither like email and to be honest when you are writing 6 or 7 A4 sheets, paper and pen is better i think.

I wont go paperless for the simple reason, if there is a query, i can go straight to my filing box and retrieve whatever i need.I dont do online banking at all as i dont trust the comp system much.

All those who store the online accounts in a folder, i hope you back up your system reg on an external hardrive, incase you comp crashes and you lose it all!

call me old fashioned but to go paperless is not for me.

When i was with a well known tel co before my comp, they did charge. but then i changed to a scottish company, got a tel and broadband package and they dont charge for a paper bill.

Florence
in the hebrides.

I have several bills on line but do print them out. A few months ago Ba-s Bank announced that if we had access to online accounts we would no longer get postal copies of our statements - I had got so used to being able to check them all he time at home that I settled for that and it is very convenient - I'm too deaf to telephone!

Magpie - they don't use pounds in New Zealand, they use dollars.

Paying for paper copies has been common practice for quite a long time now and makes perfect sense.

Meant to say, we are paperless for bank, Electric/Gas, phone and credit cards.

I still have five friends who correspond by letters. I also still belong to two correspondence magazines (Two lots of friends whose letters are put into plastic envelopes and circulated in magazine form one has 6 people in and the other has 5.) Both these have been going since the 80s. I belonged to others that fizzled out before that. Very few letters are hand written but they are all sent by post. I love getting a letter on the door mat. I posted one of the correspondence magazines this morning, Last single letter I received was last week. :-)

Hello Susan:)

Hello Foggy:)))))))) where you bin??


We have emial phone bills now, but have kept to paper statements for the bank.l think once you have changed you can't go back.l sometime print the necessary paper work.

Vic wrote a letter to his sister in USA not too long ago and she wrote back to him, also got a postcard a few days ago from her. l wrote a letter in answer to a friends letter in Feb....but yep on the whole l tend to use email...sad though it is :-(

jude

All utility companies now charge for paper billing.

I read my own gas and electric meters and bugger me does not the week after I have submitted them and paid my bill. A little man comes round to read my meters.
It is ludicrous.

Surely it's £'s not $'s?!! Just thought I'd ask!!

Although we are willing to pay the £1.50 per quarter, if you opted for the paperless bill, you could always print them off yourself?

When was the last time any of us wrote a letter? I mean, an actual, honest-to-goodness hand-written letter & not a quick email like this or a text.

And when was the last time we received one in the post? The chances are, if you're anything like me, you probably can't even remember when.

Oops,

Misunderstood you for a minute Foggy. We need the landline for our broadband so for now, are stuck with our provider. Apologies.

Hi Foggy,

It is not the actual phone charges I am complaining about. The $1.50 extra per month on our bill is because we choose to get a paper bill in the mail ....

Our provider is obviously trying to reduce their 'supposed overheads'......