To Fee....Or Not To Fee

Not me, but this is pretty close to my ideal bill-paying setup.

So, my kid's school has an online system to pay for school lunch.  This is awesome!  Anyone who knows me, knows that in my perfect world, everything could be paid for online (I'm looking at you, water company).  Hell, I haven't had an actual checkbook in almost 10 years now and I can count on one hand how many times I've actually had to have a cashier's check cut in that time period.

However, I've noticed a trend lately of parents bitching about how expensive the convenience fee is for this service.  Okay, so it's not exactly cheap.  It's $1.95 per transaction and if you have more than one child at the school each child has to be a separate transaction.  The beauty of it, to me, is the fact that it's a flat fee rather than a percentage.  So, if you are able to pay for the entire semester's meals at once like I did this morning the percentage is something like 1.2%.  Seeing as how I'm getting 1.5% back on that card, I'm coming out ahead.  Though, I can see how if you had more than one kid and could only afford to pay by the month where that fee would be closer to 5%.  At that point, the $2/month/kid would probably come close to outweighing the $20 to get a checkbook and the convenience of paying online.

There are some fees that I don't mind paying.  Like this one.  Or the one that means I don't have to go by the bank and get cash when I renew the car tags once a year.  And there are other, similar, fees that bother me.  Like the $2.95 fee to pay the power bill with a credit/debit card.  I've almost always paid it with a linked bank account and at this point, inertia has taken over.  In theory, whenever the bill is over $193 (which is about 5 months out of the year), I'd do better to pay it on the card.