Escrow or annual payment of property tax/insurance

Minimal interest if you keep it in a savings account. Maybe get one 6 month CD out of it

I've done both.

Benefit that you have use of the money for the year.
Drawback, it is a lump sum at end of year.

Always paid annually for property taxes. I paid the whole $200 per year in 1 lump sum.

I live in a shack compared to the rest of the board.

Also check if you can pay property taxes with a credit card. This was a nice incentive for me to pay my own property taxes directly.

I take a set amount from each paycheck and put it in high interest savings and then pay with my 2.5% cash back credit card.

I also now pay my home insurance with credit card and get cash rewards by doing it myself.

For me I found handling everything on my own made budget planning and adjustments much easier.

Pay my own annually. When I had a mortgage and escrow, Hibernia screwed up one year and did not pay my insurance. They even lied to me on the phone and said they had sent the check. I talked to the insurer and found out I had no coverage on my house as of midnight the night before.

I immediately drove to the insurance company, paid the premium, then came back to write an arse-ripping letter to the lender and demanded they end escrow and let me handle insurance and taxes since I was more responsible than them. To my surprise, they said have at it.

Been doing it ever since. It's not a problem unless you don't budget for it to have cash on hand when the bills hit.

paying escrow always has you prepared, its out of sight out of mind.

Depending on when your property taxes fall due, you can time payments to get 2x the itemized deduction on your federal return every other year. The Trump tax changes limited the total property tax deduction to $10k so it's probably less effective, but still an option depending on your situation

Can you explain how this is possible?

In TX, property tax bills go out in December and are due by Jan 31 of the following year. So in a single calendar year I can pay both my prior and current year's taxes (2018 taxes in Jan 2019 and 2019 taxes in Dec 2019). So on my 2019 federal return I have 2x the deduction (keeping in mind I've shifted it from a other tax year). It's only effective for deferring a deduction out of a year with unusually high taxable income,say due to large bonus or capital gain, which would cause your itemized deductions to get phased out. And with Trump's $10k cap really makes this worthless unless you have other itemized deductions to get you out of the standard deduction.

Back to your OP - you can't do this if you escrow. The banks tend to pay early and certainly don't give a damn about your tax strategy.