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Paying
Your Bills for Ease on the Road
The travel nursing lifestyle presents an
exciting, untraditional way of life. Cross country RV trips,
long-term stays at apartment complexes, or short term residence
in a small hotel is not unheard of. In order to facilitate
the nomadic nature of travel nursing, there are many tips
and tricks available to maximize efficiency and minimize trouble.
One of these is paying bills online.
Paying bills online is a near necessity
when traveling from hospital to hospital during your travel
nursing ventures. A permanent, physical address doesn't exist,
which means paying bills can be a little difficult. Paying
bills online provides plenty of conveniences. It saves time,
you save stamp money, and checkbooks don't have to be reordered
every couple of months. When discussing online billing, there
is usually one of three choices to consider: making payments
through a biller's online website, using your own bank's bill
payment service, or the less popular method of using "outside"
services to collect bills and send payments for you.
The first choice of making payments through
a biller's website is the most popular. The most convenient,
accounts can be paid through their online interface for free.
However, the downside to this option is that travel nurses
might have to report to four or five different websites every
month to make electronic payments. These websites may include
chase.com for online banking, the Con Edison electric bill,
your American Express credit card exclusively used for refilling
your RV's gas tank, and more.
The second choice of making payments online
for ease on the road is through banks. Many popular banks
offer this service, like Chase and Bank of America. Upon opening
a checking account, online bills can be paid for a small fee.
There are also banks that do not charge for this service.
Be cautious: travel nurses should make prior arrangements
with the bank to have bills send electronically instead of
by mail. There are also services that let you consolidate
all of your bills for easier payment, which eliminates the
need of going to each biller's own website.
The last option for road travel nurses is
paying bills through "e-bill" companies like wepayyourbills.com.
The most popular e-bill service, Yahoo! Pay, lets you have
companies send you bills electronically instead of through
snail mail. For up to 12 payments to different billers, Yahoo
charges less than $5 a month with a 40 cent fee on each payment
after the 12th one. Many companies are switching to electronic
billing as a method of payment; not limited to energy, credit,
retail, and electric companies.
Paying bills on the road is facilitated with the Internet.
A physical address is not available to drop invoices and bills
in Inboxes, making the above three choices the primary forms
of payment for travel nurses. As always, paying through a
biller's website is your best bet. Otherwise, there are banks
and "e-bill payment" services that perform this
for you as well. Whatever the choices - become acquainted
with your biller's websites and learn more on how you can
ease up this issue quickly and effectively.
What we do is try to pay as much as we can
on one credit card. This limits the amount of bills we get.
We also have have all our bills mailed to our mail forwarding
address. Once a week we get the mail and pay any bills that
come. Our travel company uses direct deposit to deposit my
pay into my bank account directly. Our account is with Washington
Mutual who so far has had branches everywhere we have traveled,
Florida, Texas, California, and places in between.
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