In today's world when it comes to billing that you receive from your credit card company, or your mortgage company, or your utility company, or your cell phone company, in almost every instance, these companies want you to either change over to paperless billing, or will default you over to paperless billing, or will do whatever they can to convince you that paperless billing is in your best interests. While, on the surface, this may seem like a good thing, especially if you really don't desire or need paper statements, there are downsides to paperless billing such as:
1. You may not received their email in your inbox because it goes to spam instead
2. You may have too many messages already in your inbox so you ignore or miss your billing statement
3. You may not bother looking at the actual bill but simply pay the bill sight unseen, without verifying its accuracy
4. Additional usernames and passwords need to be created and to be remembered
For instance, most people have a main email address which is typically inundated with plenty of email messages to which for issues of expediency, if the subject matter or sender doesn't initially pique your interest you will delete the message, sight unseen. Additionally, for whatever reason, with today's spam filters, that in general do a good job, your billing message from your credit card company might be routed into your junk mail and you will simply never see it and thereby suffer the consequences for having failed to pay your bill in a timely manner.
Another very bad potential problem with paperless billing is the human tendency to when it comes to bills, just reluctantly pay it without ever investigating it, just simply because it falls under the category of "out of sight, out of mind," so that you wrongly believe that the bill from said company must always be right and accurate but that isn't always the case. For example, if you use your credit card often enough, somewhere along the line you will have a billing dispute to which the amount isn't correct, or the company billing you isn't correct in doing so because you canceled that trial service, or you may have interest, late charges, or penalties attached to your bill without you being conscious of it. When it comes to utility bills, by just assuming that you can't fight a utility and blindly paying it, you may not realize that you are possibly paying a bill that has been "rounded up" so as to provide some extra money to some worthy cause, but not necessarily a cause that interests you, or much worse, you may find yourself having been defaulted into a variable rate plan, as opposed to a fixed plan, to which you are paying much more in natural gas costs than you imagined that you were, simply because you never bothered to check into it.
The fact of the matter is, for the main part, the reasons that all these billing companies are interested in switching you over to paperless billing is not really for your convenience, and not really to save a few trees, although that may well happen, but primarily to save themselves money, thereby helping their bottom line so that they are the true beneficiaries of this change, not really you. So, do yourself a favor, and verify that paperless billing is really in your best interests, because ultimately it is your decision to make.