Day 13: Bills, Bill, Bills
Bills; Every month I pay rent, utilities, electricity, internet, credit cards & loans, and myself. I’ve never gone about and optimized how I pay these things. Half of them deliver through the mail, others through e-mail, and the last don’t deliver any bills whatsoever. Having just graduated from college, I moving around sporadically… I’ve missed payments out of sheer confusion! So, I’m proposing a three step process:
First: Switching all bills to electronic systems, ‘e-bills’, e-mail billing, electronic billing, et cetra.
Second: Pay every bill on the first of the month.
Third: Setup a digital reminder system to remind me to pay ALL the bills.
Paperless…
As someone attempting to erase my carbon footprint, every aspect of ‘paperless’ness (is that a word?) is a step in the right direction. Most (if not all) financial institutions offer the ability for paperless bills, so why not? Not only does this help the environment, it raises awareness of upcoming bills. Most people I know check their physical ’snail’ mail once every few days, while their Gmail-Thunderbird-Outlook-Crackberry reminds them instantaneously with every little piece of digital paraphanalia arriving at their digital doorstep. It just works out better this way.
Counterintuitive Payments
My first thought towards paying my bills relays the minute interest gained paying the last day of a given grace period. In effect I pay one on the first, one on the sixth, one on the fifteenth, and so on. This gets seriously confusing, and I’ve missed more than I wish to admit. In this case, I plan to instead pay everything on the first of the month. It’s easier, and although that pays some early, the sheer simplicity of paying out everything at the first of the month helps ease my over-tasked schedule.
Since that’s not easy enough:
I also include step three, this is very important. Looking back, I’ve already instilled ten different simplification techniques, as the number grows higher, it becomes more difficult to track. Why track this myself? By setting digital reminders, the internet can remind me when bills need to be paid.
For this I set up an account at Remember The Milk, created a ‘bills’ list, and inserted a reminder for every bill, the amount that’s due, and the URL to where I can pay it. (I’ve included step by step pictures on how to do this after the break)
On top of this, most institutions make it possible to auto-pay! For every auto-payment, my reminder consists only of updating Buddi (my super-cool-multi-platform-open-source-finance-software)
Of course I’m always open for opinions from everyone out there. Any tips on bills?
HOWTO setup Remember The Milk bill reminders:
Step 1: Setup an account! Just go to RememberTheMilk.com and create an account.
Step 2: Once you’ve set up an account, you’ll be greeted with a page listing options in the upper right. Click on Settings and that’ll give you a tabbed interface on the right side of the page. From there, click on lists, then ‘add list’. See this picture below with it’s awesome arrows. (Follow 1, 2, 3!)
Step 3: Go to ‘tasks’ in the upper right, click on your Bills list, then add task. (or hit ‘t’ on your keyboard) Type in the name of the bill then the amount of the monthly payment (if you know about how much you’ll owe). Hit enter, then select ‘due’ in the little menu to the right. Type in ‘First of the Month’. From there, click on ‘Repeat’ and type in Monthly. If there is a URL that’ll lead you to however you pay this bill, put that in URL and BAM you’re done. Here’s another picture to help guide where these things are!