Sent in a check for my wife's 2006 IRA on 4/9
Today is the tax deadline, but there is no sign the mutual fund management received it

Sending another check today and filing my return.
Will be calling the mutual fund and as soon they receive one check, will put a stop payment on the other one.

The conclusion -- DO YOU TAXES EARLY!!!

Ouch, Yan!

Sometimes checks "lost in the mail" can be so frustrating. I've had bad luck mailing mortgage checks, for example. Our old mortgage company for our previous house was notorious for "never receiving" their checks. It used to make me livid.

One of my goals is to get all of my bill-paying set up online. In fact, I should ask a question about that here in the forums.

I realize that this doesn't help right now, but we always fund our Vanguard IRAs electronically.

Since all of my banking, saving, and investing is done online, all of my bills are paid electronically. I have paper checks, but they're a last resort. I don't schedule any of my payments to recur automatically, I go online a couple times a month and schedule them individually for one-time only payments. This way I periodically check the status of payments and can also see if I should be expecting a bill in the mail soon (based on the date of last month's payment).

I have Vanguard's "maximize" contribution option enabled for my wife's IRA. Whatever the IRS max limit is, it'll auto split your available left for the year over the number of remaining contribution periods. So if you had turned on 01/01/07, it would have auto withdrawn 333.33 or 333.34 from your account every month. And then autostep up to 416.66/416.67 for 2008 ($5K limit).

One option that would have been possible for those w/o electronic avenues is to go to a bank and open an IRA CD for 3 months and then have your fund company/brokerage roll it over upon maturity.