Many savvy computer users have opted to pay their bills automatically with bill pay services, but it’s not exactly 100% reliable. Since the online bill pay programs became available, there are still a lot of kinks.

Rosa said she was taken aback when she found late fee charges on recent bills because she paid the bills on time with bill pay.

“I thought it was a mistake,” she said. “Every month, the money was taken directly out of my account, but the process did not work as I thought. In some cases, it took much longer than expected for the payment to make its way to the credit card company.”

As a result, Rosa racked up several late payments. According to Smart magazine, more than 56% of Americans have one or more bills paid automatically and now Rosa said it’s not good to have companies automatically go into your accounts.

“After the problem, I used to pay my bills and online and pray the payment was there in time,” said Rosa. “It became too frustrating for me.”

In fact, there are many problems consumers face as they try to save the cost of postage and get their bills paid on time. Besides late payments, consumers are faced with lost payments, extra fees, double-dipping, lack of cancellation options and the risk of automatically paying whether the charges are your or not.

“It’s a great convenience, but after I ran into some problems I am afraid to continue,” said Darlene. “I was the victim of identity theft and someone rang up $3,000 in charges. I found out about the identity theft after a credit card took $3,000 out of my checking account to my surprise and dismay.”

Darlene suggests that if you want to pay your credit card bills online don’t have it set up automatically through your bank account. Instead, go to each credit card company’s website and type in your bank account information each time you pay the bill.

“I educated myself after I experienced some problems,” she said. “Common sense must prevail when it comes to using the internet … there is lots of room for error.”