el crispito

First off, electric bills arrive every two months. This cuts down on how often they have to come check your meter. For most people, they are not that high, so it's not like it really sets you back to have to pay two months at a time, which is how you have to pay it. You cannot pay off half or set up some way to pay monthly.

The next big difference is that you cannot mail in a payment. You must either go to an authorized location and pay in person, or pay online. The payment locations include the electric company office (CFE | en inglés - Comisión Federal de Electrícidad), Gigante (a megastore or their regular supermarket outlets called Super G), most major banks (Banamex, Bancomer, Santander Serfin, Banorte, Inbursa, HSBC and Scotiabank Inverlat), and OXXO convenience stores.

If you want to pay online, you go to their page linking to the approved banks with online payment services for account holders. This page also has a link so that you can sign up (en inglés) for online payment service with them directly. In either case, you'll need an actual bill in front of you so that you know your service name and service number.

The service name is the name in which your account is registered. It is listed right above your address. This is usually not your name. Most of the time, when you rent or buy a place, the electricity works and you just start paying for it. You do not have to sign up for service with the CFE. Therefore, the name on your bill might be the name of the person who lived there last, or the person who lived there 20 years ago. Most people do not bother to have this changed. There really is not much need, although we have been told at one specific place that to use the electric bill as proof of a residence, it needs to be in one of our names. Yet this was later disputed by another employee at the same business.

That brings us to an important point: the electric bill is an essential document in Mexico, which is as important as a driver's license, birth certificate or social security card in the United States. You absolutely have to have one to set up certain services. Along with your signed rental agreement, it verifies that you have a residence in Mexico. We were able to sign up for cable and Internet access without it, but you need it for other things like that, like to open a bank account or get home telephone service. For this reason, if you rent or buy in Mexico, be sure to get a copy of a previous electric bill (it usually does not have to be the most recent, but it's always best to use that one if you can) from the landlord or seller. Otherwise, you might have to wait a month or two months to get the next one in your mailbox. It has to be the original; they will not accept not a copy.

You want to be sure to pay your electric bill on time. Although almost every other aspect of business in Mexico has a very, um, flexible schedule for completion or compliance, the CFE will turn your power off the day after the due date if you do not pay. Then the pain in the neck is that you have to go to the CFE office, with guaranteed long lines, to pay your bill and have your service re-instated.

When you pay at one of the locations mentioned above, you will get a receipt. If the cashier is nice, they'll staple the receipt to the bill. This is handy if for some reason the CFE doesn't think you've paid when you already have and you have to show them proof of payment. This has not ever happened to us, but it's important to hold onto both the bill and the receipt after you've paid. It's just good sense.

If you look at the entire bill, you will notice that there is an area where they tell you if you have received the subsidio given to those who use little electricity. I suspect this is to help out really poor people, because the line between getting the subsidio and not getting it seems pretty low. On this bill, which was from a period when our apartment was vacant, the subsidio was in effect. On our last bill, because we used too much energy, we did not get the subsidio, and there is a little note saying that if you want to get it, they suggest you use less electricity.

As you can see on the bill, they have a nice little chart documenting your usage this year versus last year at the same time. Because the usage is heavier for January and February, 2005, then very low for the rest of the year (we moved into the apartment the first week of January, 2006), I presume that the aparment had been vacant since March.