Online-Banking: 6 Features You Should Be Using!

Many people bank online now. It is nothing new, but even if you are, you might be suprised at some of the features that are available, depending on your bank and whether or not you actually are using them.

Services Are Free

The first thing to recognize about online banking and all of these services is that they should be free at this stage of the game. There is a huge market of banks that offer these services now and therefore there shouldn’t be a premium on getting them. If you aren’t getting these services (and maybe more) for free, you should consider switching to a bank where you do get them.

Online-Reconciliation

By banking online, you rarely will need to “balance” your checkbook anymore, at least I don’t. It should be fairly simple to see items that you’ve written and catch them clear. For those of you who are accustomed to balancing your checkbook when the statement comes in, you had to deal with somewhere between 25 and 35 days of activity each time you balanced your checkbook, likely taking somewhere between 15 and 30 minutes. This was really wasted time. Now, by checking your balance once or twice a week, you can quickly and easily keep things balanced and ensure there are no errors. (Checking your bank statements regularly is important.)

Online-Statements

Instead of having to deal with searching folders and piles of paperwork for that check you wrote three months ago, it is easy to find that information online now. Most banks offer a moving window of at least 90 days of activity where you can easily see what you’ve done for the past 3 months in terms of checks and purchases. A quick log-in process and the information you were looking for is right at your fingertips.

Downloadable Statements

For the most part, people who are really interested in personal finance have some kind of program or routine to keep their information related to their bank accounts and such in order. But if you are not really that obsessed or involved with your finances, you still may like this feature. In addition to getting the data in the basic comma-separated, and quicken-file formats, my statements are now available for me to download in pdf format. Provided that you am comfortable keeping this data on my hard drive (and you should be, although I will be addressing that issue in a separate article), you can easily archive all of your data electronically and reduce the need to hang on to tons of bank statements for years on end.

Online-Bill Pay

In addition to seeing all of your checks and purchases, many banks now also offer online bill pay which eliminates the need for checks altogether. The financial companies love this because it is less paperwork for them as well. Your payment is nothing but a bunch of ones and zeros zipping through the internet in a batch of ACH or EFT transactions. This is unnerving to some, but for me, it is just fine. No more writing checks; no more losing bills; and no more buying stamps. I recently got my mom onto online-bill pay. See the story here.

Linked Accounts

Once you get accustomed to online banking, you are just one step away from a high-yield online account at either ING or EmigrantDirect or one of the other competitors for your savings dollars. Since you are comfortable with the processes, you will see how easy it is to link accounts whether it is your brokerage to your checking, or an ING savings to your business checking. Nearly any type of link and easy electronic transfer is possible once you have become comfortable with online banking.

So if you haven’t started banking online yet, you might want to think about starting!