Time Tips?

[red_trillium]

Does anyone have any tips on how to regularly manage your bills/account but that doesn't take a ton of time?

Our situation: I work full time. I leave the house at 6am, get back at 6pm. I do over half to 3/4 the house work & about 1/3 to 1/2 the cooking usually. My wife has had an increase in her chronic pain levels which means I'm now doing at least 3/4 to all the house work, all the cooking and my usual work schedule & trying to help her with daily things she's having problems with. We're busy at work and going through some Big Changes so I'm also running on low energy so not a lot available. Fortunately we're only just heading into spring but that does mean the gardening is going to start back up, at the very least for our food plants and regular watering.

I've always had a bad bill habit--leaving things until we get paid each fortnight. I've been trying to get better but at this point can't do it as regularly as I'd like due to time and energy being low. As you can imagine this starts a viscous cycle of over spending, dipping into the (diminishing) savings and making me reluctant to face the bills.

How do you stay on top of your bills and balancing your account regularly? Do you do it once or twice or more a week? Do you do certain parts at different times? I've tried to "reward" myself for doing it, I just feel guilty and go without doing/getting something then.

We're hoping that her pain levels reduce back below the spike she had a couple weeks ago, but as she's lived with chronic pain for over 30 years we know they won't go away. I need to get some good habits in place before things do get much worse.

Comments

[drunkoffthestars]

I keep track of everything via Mint. I also make 99% of my purchases via credit card, so it's pretty set it and forget it, I don't have to worry about tracking cash at all, so this is a major YMMV. Mint also has a relatively new 'bill' calendar thing where it has a little calendar of when all your bills are due and about how much they are. It can also send you email reminders. I believe it will do this with just having a mint account even if you don't give it any of your financial information.

I'm a medium fan of automatic billing. I have things I 'trust' and can pay via credit card without penalty (Netlix, cell phone) on automatic billing, and I set up online payments for things I don't 'trust'/can't pay with a credit card (electricity, credit cards) once a month, usually around the first of the month. The only thing I pay via paper is the gas bill because they want automatic debits directly from my checking account (HELL NO) or charge a hefty fee to use a credit/debit card, but that shows up around the same time as everything else and is generally quite low so I pay it as soon as I get it and put the check in the mailbox that night.

If it doesn't imperil your finances to have everything due at once, you could probably call up the companies you do business with and ask for your billing dates to be shifted so that they all occur around the same time so you only have to sit down and take care of them once a month, which cuts down on the amount of time you have to be thinking about it. For instance, both of my credit cards are due around the 10th, so I only have to sit down once a month and set up the payments. This works out really well for me, but I'm also paid on a monthly basis and usually thinking about money things around then and paying rent, etc.

Also, I like having a medium-size buffer in my checking account so that when I go to pay a bill, I just pay it and don't have to worry about when the next paycheck comes in to afford it. But I know YMMV wildly on that one. Some people can mentally mark that money of as reserved and some can't.

[shadowandflame]

I don't know if this would work for you, but my bills are either automatically charged to my credit card or (in the case of rent) automatically debited from my bank account. So I only have to remember to pay the credit card bills every month. I find it much simpler this way; I used to occasionally forget to pay something, and that never happens anymore. Plus I get extra points on my credit card, which is a nice little bonus.

Another possibility is to set up pre-authorized payments for your bills so they will automatically come out of your bank account (instead of going onto a credit card).

Sympathies on the chronic pain situation; that must be hard. :( I hope her pain levels do go back down to what they were previously.

[carolyn_claire]

I pay bills twice a month, on the 1st and the 15th. I keep a buffer amount in checking so that I know that everything can be paid, and I created my own simple cash flow/budget balance sheet to make sure that unexpected expenses don't cut too deeply into that buffer. I can project the entire financial year with it and then plug in actual expenses as they happen to see how they'll affect cash flow going forward. Pretty much all of our bills are payable online, and I have everything I pay bookmarked in the order I pay them each month. (For those few things that aren't payable online, I use my bank's bill pay option, which I can do through online banking, so no paper or stamps required.) I pay out the first half of the month's bills on the 1st and the second half's on the 15th, and I'm done--takes less than half an hour each time.

[lassarina]

I'm an enormous fan of Mint. Most of my bills come due within the first week of the month (minus the electric, which is bi-weekly); anything that wouldn't fit that schedule is actually taken care of by my housemate and then we settle up later. Mint reminds me 7 days before my bill is due, and so on the 1st of the month I sit down and pay everything right there. (Then my account balance cries for a while.)

[kyrielle]

My husband handles a bunch of our bills online, but the ones that don't do that (because they can't, because they charge too much, because they're not predictable), I open the mail every 2-3 days and WRITE THE DUE DATE ON THE OUTSIDE OF THE ENVELOPE and stuff it in a little spot where only "bills not yet paid" go. Closest due date on top, everything else underneath in any order.

We run the bills every 2 weeks UNLESS we get an early due date, then we make time and plow through any due before the 2-week mark before that one is due.

Having the date on the outside helps keep me on track really well, though. I know when I have to worry and when "dammit, I'm flat exhausted" is a fine thing to say, because really it CAN wait.