When you get a bill in the mail, how do you pay it? Many people still pay with checks, but that number is dwindling. About 30 million Americans now pay at least several bills online. About 10 years ago, we wrote about 50 billion checks a year as a country. Now it’s about 30 billion. As a result, check printing factories are shutting their doors. What’s causing the change? Electronic bill pay. It’s just so easy to do once you set it up. And it’s much safer than writing checks. When you send a check, you have no way of verifying that the payment was made. The recipient can simply say he or she never received it. And you’re out of luck. With electronic bill pay, you have all of the proof you need. The way banks mail and process checks is changing, too. When you mail in a check, an electronic image will be taken and your actual check will be destroyed. So, basically, all checks are going to end up in electronic medium. It’s just a matter of whether the check starts out as electronic too.