I think 'paying bills' here is shorthand for the general administrative burden of being alive, which seems to have grown substantially in recent decades.

In what ways has it grown? It seems easier than ever to track and automate personal finance.

For me, "paying bills" is not the literal act of making payments to vendors and creditors. It is the act of exporting one's labor outside the family, in exchange for the medium of exchange required to pay one's bills.

I don't "pay my bills" by writing checks and mailing them. I "pay my bills" by working at a corporate peon job for 40 hours a week. If I do the same kind of work at home on a side project, that is still work, but not "bill paying" work.

The literal act of paying bills takes me all of five minutes every month. An hour per year, whenever I don't have to add any new payees to the system. I spend more time voiding my bowels, which I always seem to have enough time for, regardless of how much time I spend working.

Maybe ancestor post was referring to doing accounts payable and accounts receivable accounting work for the business? Seems like that might be more labor intensive than hitting the "pay" button for the electric bill, even with modern business accounting software. Even then, it wouldn't be something I'd do every day, and if all I felt I could do in the afternoons is light administrative work, I think I'd just knock off early if I didn't have enough to fill at least a solid 2 hours, or if it was the last day of the month.

I'm the ancestor, and yeah, I do work through my own firm and there are some monthly bills and bookkeeping that's not automatic. I also live overseas and pay my utilities and rent via EU bank transfer.

exactly.. it's literally a job in itself.

You probably should stay away from comment threads about personal productivity then?

If someone writes about how THEY do things it's a good way to improve MY process. If it improves things for me, what's wrong with saying thanks to the writer?

Most of my bills can be automated, but a few cannot. I also take time to read over my statements to check for fraud/bad habits.

My bank doesn't know how much my bill is going to be every month, so I have to put the amount in. Fortunately, I use simple.com and paying a bill with their mobile app takes a couple of seconds (once I have entered the companies info). Some companies have decent recurring billing via ACH, and I use that on most of my credit cards (I still check the statements each month), but my electric, water, sewer, and gas companies (all separate where I am) all have absolutely terrible websites (and the electric company just plain sucks generally), so I often find myself just paying those bills manually as they come in (after checking them for accuracy).

You don't have direct debits for this sort of thing ie bill is paid automatically?

I can't speak for others, but there's no way in hell I'm giving any company direct debit abilities to my bank account. Given the fuck-ups we see here daily by banks and businesses, I think anyone who does that is playing with fire. But if it works for you, go for it! I'll spend the 5 minutes every other week to type in the amount needed on my bank's website to send whoever an electronic payment rather than letting them pull money from my account. It's worth the time to me.

In the UK, and I think many other European countries, the direct debit system is very heavily slanted in favour of the customer.

Here[1] is the UK Direct Debit Guarantee. It's extremely easy for the customer to reverse a transaction, and (advising the merchant) "Given the limited scope for appeals [against counterclaims] within the Direct Debit scheme, most disputes happen outside of it".

https://gocardless.com/direct-debit/guarantee/

YOu have to setup the ACH/Direct Debit with each utility here, you can't just set it up at the bank. And the utilities have crappy websites/processes for doing so- if they allow you to do it at all. They have a monopoly, so why bother with improving customer service?

They should bother because it saves administration, and they get the money at the expected time.

Most utilities companies in the UK are private and must compete, but even the few exceptions encourage people to pay using direct debit.

Yeah this amazed me too. Usually gas and electric companies make a yearly estimate based on last year's use, then divide that by 12 months. If the estimate overshot, you get money back, otherwise you have to pay a little extra at the end of a 12 month cycle.

That is an option for most of my utilities, but I haven't set it up. I moved a year ago so it would have been difficult to estimate usage at that point. I guess I could set it up now.

Same, it's usually the utility companies that I have trouble getting automated. They have shoddy websites/weird rules/etc.

I prefer not to pay my bills automatically because it doesn't take much time and lets me make sure they are correct.

You can still check if they're correct if you do it automatically though. You can just cancel the tranfer.

My bank doesn't make that easy for me. Besides, it only takes me a few minutes each month to review and pay bills.

Plus, you can more easily switch banks.

Provision and migrate accounts with Ansible?

Manually pay bills every month, or whatever period, so that it's easier to switch account? Even if you're switching every year that doesn't sound like a good deal.

In the UK the banks take care of switching over your direct debits and standing orders when you switch bank accounts.

Everything should have automatic payments, and if they don't then they don't deserve to get paid. That said I use Prisim to take care of the rest that don't.