How to Pay Your Bills in Korea

Filed as: How-To // Responses: 5

If you’re new to Korea, then this video’s for you. We didn’t know that we could pay our bills (internet, cell-phone, and gas) at the machines for a very long time. For the first few months or so, we’ve been waiting in long lines at the bank, which always seem to be much longer than they naturally should be. And so, to save you the time you would waste in line to pay these bills, we bring you a new video, explaining how you should pay your bills.

A couple of words first: we cannot pay our apartment fees (re: electricity) through these machines; the only bills this machine will accept are the uniformly sized bills that say “OCR” on them. We think the OCR stands for “Optical Character Recognition,” since the machine scans your bills and pops up its info on the screen. Oh, and one more thing: supposedly you can pay your bills online, or do your banking online through KB Bank, but I heard that you have to have a Windows computer to do so. We’re Mac users, and – as such – have been ostracized from the Korean internets (they don’t like Macintosh around here).

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The secret ingredient is salt.

Do only some banks have these machines? I have KB as well, but the branches I've been to seem to only have the regular ATMs with English.
http://www.facebook.com/krahn Ryan Krahn

My bank (Shinhan) only has these machines INSIDE the actual bank. So if you want to pay your bills that way, you have to go while the bank is open! Kinda defeats the purpose, doesn't it?

You can still pay your bills at a regular ATM using the transfer function, and it's even in English. Look on your bill: there should be a list of bank names somewhere written in Hangeul with numbers beside them. These are the company's bank accounts at several different banks. If your bank isn't included in the list, you can choose to send the money to a different bank, but will have to pay a service charge.

Just choose "Transfer" from the English menu, and follow the prompts to choose the bank and enter the account number and amount to charge. It's really easy (at least at Shinhan).

http://www.eatyourkimchi.com Eatyourkimchi

Ha! Yes, it does kinda defeat the purpose. In fact, there are even easier ways to pay, since you can do it online as well, but we haven't ventured into that yet. I'll look into the way you suggested though. Thanks!

The Gothel

Hi… i am in seoul, and one of my bills are from kepco. On their website, they have these rather interesting bits of information on the different ways to pay bills with them (but perhaps useful to other suppliers too?): http://www.kepco.co.kr/eng/

…it seems we can even pay bills at family mart stores, 24/7? So no need for all the bank fiddling, which i have tried, rather unsuccessfully i must add. :)