Id like to set up bill pay for my rent with Fidelity. I want to make it easy on the landlord by sending an electronic transfer automatically each month instead of a paper check.
I had an account with Ally and they only send a paper check.
Thanks!
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I have never really used the bill pay feature with my credit union, until last week. I went to pay a vendor through Bill pay, and expected to use ACH. Only after submitting payment I realized that it was being sent out via check. Not a huge deal.
I tried chatting with my credit union, thinking ACH was a feature that needed turned on. They said that only certain vendors support ACH payments, like Comcast, and it uses the third party payment processor to know whether ACH is better. I am not able to tell it “please pay this vendor with ACH.” They also wouldn’t tell me who the third party vendor was.
Is this normal? I would like to have ACH payments enabled for some of my vendors, but don’t want to pay for something like Bill.com to do this.
Firstly, it isn't so generous. It is a win-win, but the bank doesn't have to mail me a free box of checks with my new account, or offer free printing to compete for my business. They already have the infrastructure to send out checks, so the actual cost for my bank to mail a check on my behalf is pretty minimal. It might even save them some cost and reduce exposure. All the better if they don't actually mail a check at all.
Per my bank
Individuals and most companies you pay using Send Money will be mailed a paper check. Your check is guaranteed to arrive by the delivery date you choose when you create the payment.
...
A select number of companies–very large corporations such as telecoms, utilities, and cable companies–are part of our electronic biller network and will be paid electronically. These payments arrive within two business days...
So the answer to your question depend on what kind of bill pay you used. If it was an electronic payment, there isn't a realistic possibility the money isn't cashed.
If your bank did mail a paper check, the same rules would apply as if you did it yourself. (I suppose it would be up to the bank. When I checked with my bank's support this was their answer.)
Therefore per this answer: Do personal checks expire? [US]
It is really up to your bank whether or not they allow the check to be cashed at a later date. If you feel the check isn't cashed quickly enough, you would have to stop payment and contact whoever you were trying to pay and perhaps start again. (Or ask them to hustle and cash the check before you stop it.)
Finally, I would bet a dime that your bank doesn't "pre-fund" your checks. They are just putting a hold on the equivalent money in your account so you don't overdraw. That is the real favor they do for you. If you stopped the check, your money would be unfrozen and available.
EDIT
Please read the comment about me losing a dime; seems credible.
This is based on my experience with Chase and may not be applicable to other banks. As you mentioned Chase as one of the banks you do business with hopefully this will be helpful to you.
The money does come out of your account immediately. If the check isn't cashed in a certain amount of time, the check expires and you get the money credited back to your account.
Once you have made a bill payment online you can check on the status of your check by looking at your payment activity, finding the payment in question, and following the "proof of payment" link. There is will provide you with information on your payment which you can submit to your payee to prove when you submitted the payment, and which they can use to verify with the bank that you really did send the payment as you claimed. Once the check is cashed, this page will also contain images of the front and back of the cashed check, so you can prove that the recipient really did cash it. You can see from this info that the check is being funded from a different account number than your own, which is good for security purposes since (per Knuth, 2008) giving someone else your bank routing number and account number as found on your personal checks basically provides them with all they need to (fraudulently, of course) clean out your account.
I need to pay an invoice to someone who only accepts checks, but I currently do not have any physical checks. However, my bank offers Bill Pay. If I add this person as a payee and send them the money using BIll Pay, will my bank send a physical check to this person for me? This is my first time doing this, so I wanted to make sure I am understanding this properly. Thanks in advance.