Organization 101 – Lesson 6
Paying Bills and Dealing with Money
Paying and keeping up with bills is a tricky thing to do especially with credit cards and car payments. I have found a no hassle, no mess easy way to organize bill and keep them all paid and up to date without ever getting another late charge.
The first thing that you need to do is get your bills organized. I have found a great little bill organizer that I got from Staples and it works great and it organizes the bills from January to December. It’s just called “Home Finances” and Day Runner makes it. The great thing about it is that you can either store it at the end of the year and keep the files for future reference (up to 7 years for the IRS) or you can just not use the writing area and reuse the book over and over each year. (Another simple way is to just get a 3-hole punch and 12 notebook dividers. You can make your own out of a 2-inch 3-ring binder. You might even like that better. )
Once you have your bills organize, you have to keep it that way. It doesn’t mean that you have to put your bills in as soon as they come in but have a basket or bin that you collect them in. Open them, look at them, throw out the trash that comes with them and put them in your bin (Having a stapler handy is also a good idea so you can keep muti-page bills together and in order).
There are not many steps to the bill paying process but it can be tedious, in the end, though it will be the best thing you ever did for yourself. You will need a Bank with online banking and checking to do your bills this way, it is worth it to find a different bank if yours doesn’t do this. Trust me, it will save you time, money, and energy by just scheduling your bills online (not with the account holders). You will be able to cancel payments when you have to but they will all be ready to go every payday.
- Call Utility Company and get on the Budget Billing program (where they charge you the same amount each month) and find out what that amount will be.
- Find all of your bills and figure out what half of your normal cost is each month.
- Log on to your banks website and set-up an account for each of your bills, including car, credit cards and house payments.
- You want to set up an automatic payment for half of your monthly amount every payday (every two weeks or the days of the month you get paid)
Once the account has been set up, all you need to do is check on it once a month. Also in my account I set up account transfers to my savings. You can do the same and put a little bit of money into the savings account every payday and have something for a rainy day.
Using this process you will know exactly how much money will be coming out of your account every payday, because it will always be the same. Meaning you will have the same amount to spend every payday as well. And with car, credit cards and house payment, you will actually pay them off faster if your paying every 2 weeks. When you first start you will have to send in a double payment possibly to pay off the current bill and then begin the new one or start at the beginning of the month. Then there will be times when you have a credit for your utilities and such and you can skip a payment and do something fun with that money. You will never be late with a bill again though, and your credit will skyrocket, just make sure you’re paying a little more then the minimum in both payments.
Something else that my husband and I did was to chose one of our credit cards each and we use them as our personal cash card. We use our “allowance” (it is good to give yourself a set amount of money each payday to spend on yourself, and not to overspend. It makes you feel good but protects you from being broke at the end of the week) to pay the bill and we have some spending money.
We have 3 kinds of money in our house our “allowance”, the Bank or House money (money that can only be used for household things like groceries and things like that) and Credit. We try not to use the credit (unless it’s our card because that gets paid every 2 weeks) except for big purchases that we have to get, like airline tickets or appliances. We want to use the credit but we don’t want kill us either.
I hope that this helps you in some way, if you have any questions or I didn’t explain things quite clearly enough just comment and I will respond joyfully with advice on how to do this. It was the best thing that I did for my stress and my family by getting rid of the money worry in our lives. You can do the same.