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

[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.

[red_trillium]

Thank you for this suggestion. I get paid every 2 weeks (wife lost her job & can't work anymore so down to 1 income), some months have 3 pays but this might be something I can do. If I'm onto it, I'll usually write out the bills do next pay (if I'm not then it's 2 weeks gone and my next pay is about to go in and bills aren't paid).

Maybe if I go for 3 times a month to catch all my bills and pays, see if that helps. I try to keep an extra $100-$150 as "forgotten money buffer"--I estimate we have $100-$150 less than we actually do just in case of me messing up the sums or something happening.

DO you track your daily spending too? We both mostly use our Eftpos/ATM cards for stuff and entering the individual receipts is one of the daunting things for me. I don't want to just wing it and not do that but maybe doing the budget every 3-4 weeks would cut this back.

Thanks!

[carolyn_claire]

I used to keep a "disappeared" $100.00 in my account, too, just in case I made a mistake, but since I started using my budgeter I don't need to. I do keep track of my ATM/debit card spending, but not right as I spend it, usually; I balance my budget sheet against my online banking info anywhere from weekly to a couple of times a month, just plugging the bank's info into my spreadsheet. I generally know how much we have and how much I can afford to spend for the entire month, and I keep enough in the account that I don't get too close to zero, usually. The more I spend, the more often I update the budget with my expenditures so I don't lose track of what's in there.

I found that it's easier for me to make payments twice a month on a regular schedule than it was to try to rotate payments every two weeks. That third payment per month that happens twice a year I would put in savings, or leave in checking to pad the balance if I'd had some extra expenditures that brought the balance too far down. It should work fine for you to make your payments on payday, though, or the day after--as long as you have everything budgeted out and organized it's still easy to do.

If you're interested, I could send you a copy of my simple spreadsheet for budgeting; I use OpenOffice, which is compatible with Excel, if you have that. You can email me at cc1 at tds dot net if you'd like.