Like you and grania, I write checks and buy stamps to mail my bill payments. I see so many errors on some of my bills that I’m not about to permit automatic deductions from my account.
Read some article last year of a elderly man who had auto-deduct. What family he had lived far away and they seldom communicated. .....Apparently, he died and it was a year or so before he was discovered. All utilities had been cut off because they had kept doing deductions until they drained his small bank account.
Wow. And I am bet that happens often, given that so many live alone these days.