How To Organize Bill Payments

How To Organize Bill Payments pexels.com Make a bill paying day. Every time you run out of an ingredient or type of food in your house, you do not go running to the supermarket immediately only to buy that one item, right? You either wait until you are low on food and must go shopping or you have given yourself a specific day of the week that you always grocery shop on. And you usually do not do so pell-mell, grabbing whatever you feel like and putting it in your cart, only realizing once you have arrived home that you forgot to buy some staple ingredients. No! You are much more organized than that in fact you sometimes even have a grocery list. Why should paying your bills be any different? Instead of trying to remember the due date of each bill payment and maybe missing it, assign yourself a day or two that is devoted to bill-paying. It should be the same day(s) every month and stick to that pattern. Decide that the 15th of each month (or the 1st and the 15th of each month) is when you are going to pay your bills. Choosing days closer to the days when you get paid is ideal so that you can be sure you have the money to pay the bills at those times. Go down your checklist of bills that need to be paid and sit there and do them all at once. That way, you will not forget or miss any and everything will be paid right on time (if not early)! Write it down. Sometimes it can even be hard to remember what bills you need to pay, not even mentioning when you need to pay them. Some are not monthly, which can be harder to remember, or their due dates can be different each month. The best way to keep your bill payments organized is to write everything down. Start at the beginning. What bills do you need to pay? How often? By which dates? Then write it down somewhere that you are going to look and check often. Are you the kind of student that writes everything on a whiteboard in your room to keep track? Do you live by the dictates of your planner and write everything down in it? Do you keep a piece of paper tacked to your fridge so that you see it each time you open it? Whatever is best for you, write down and keep your list there in easy access so that you never miss another bill payment again. pexels.com Keep everything together. A lot of companies have been slowly transitioning to only providing you with electronic bills that you can pay online. But many companies still prefer and insist on sending printed bills and those can be the hardest to keep track of. You have a busy daily life and sometimes, you can just toss the mail to the side. However, that is how bills get lost. And lost bills become unpaid bills and it can all be a big mess. Avoid this by keeping all your bills together in a safe place. As soon as you receive it, put it in the pile to be addressed on your bill paying day. If you have a space on your bookshelf, keep them held up on your fridge with a magnet, or safeguard them in a little basket; do what you need to to keep them together and in a place that you will not later forget. There is nothing worse than knowing you have all the bills and that they are all together but you still cannot pay them because you cannot remember where you hid them! You can also keep all your online bills in the same place. Email inboxes can be messy places! Create two folders devoted to bill paying. One folder can be labeled Unpaid Bills and the second Paid Bills. Keep those online bills in the Unpaid folder until that one or two days a month you sit down to pay bills, and once they are paid, move them into the paid folder!