64: How to Make Bill Management Easier
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Welcome to episode 64 of Permission to be Messy. I'm your host, JoAnn Krall and today I'm talking all about bills. Yes, I'm going to talk a little bit about budgets, but this is really about managing your bills and, keeping track of it, making sure that you're not making payments late. And making sure that you have enough money when the actual bills are due.
So it's really important to keep this process organized for your sanity and to ensure that you're not paying late fees. Thatyou have enough money to pay your bills. So there's a few pieces to this, and I'll start with. It's important to know where your money's going.
Keeping track of where your money's going for at least a month can be really helpful for you to see what's actually going out, whether it's in bill form or, if you're making purchases during the month of whatever it is. It's important to do a log of what's going out if you don't already know. So that's really a good place to start when we're talking about this process.
Some of the things that we face when, paying bills is forgetting due dates, overspending, some people are living paycheck to paycheck, even if they're saving long-term savings in their 401k, the actual cashflow that they have coming in, isn't always covering what they're actually spending.
So you're actually saving, but you're technically living paycheck to paycheck with your cashflow. Some people are not saving at all and living paycheck to paycheck and beyond, bringing in more income, we can really think about what we're spending to at least take some control of our finances.
Because finances are one of the biggest stresses in life.
It affects our mental wellbeing, our relationships, obviously our financial wellbeing. So first, let me talk about some things that I've heard people say, for advice of taking control of your bills.
Creating a bill calendar. and that's writing down the due dates from monthly bills, automating payments where possible, setting reminders using calendar alerts. And these are all great tips, but pulling it all together, isn't always that easy
So for example, we, there are some bills that we can automate, right?
There are some that we don't in some of those bills that we don't come and paper, some come via email. Some don't come at all. We just have to know that they're there and that they're due. We need one central place to implement all of these techniques. One thing that I have found helpful for people that like to, do some stuff a little bit more manual. And even if you're doing things digitally is to create a spreadsheet that you can print out each month.
And on that spreadsheet, you have all of your bills. You have all your monthly bills, your quarterly bills and your annual bills. So you have a whole list of all of the bills. And then you leave a space for the dollar amount.
Some of these are the same every month. So you can actually type in the amount. So that when you print them out, it's already there and some of them vary. So you want to leave a space to be able to write them in or type them in. If you're going to keep this digitally. then you, the next column is going to show the due dates. And this is sometimes these fluctuate.
Sometimes these are automatic. So typically what I'll tell people is put the earliest date, or you can specify earliest, always whatever you want to say, if you want to have,note next to the date, or you can just put the earliest date that they would be due. So if. If the bill is usually due on the third, maybe the fourth, the fifth, but it doesn't come before the third, put the third as the date due. And then you would have a column to indicate whether it's been paid for that month. And then this just gets printed out each month. It's a whole spreadsheet of everything. Now you can also add a column and this would be really helpful for somebody if they had to take over your bills. A column that says where the bill comes.
Maybe it's an automatic payment, so it doesn't matter. It's going to automatically be taken from your checking account. Maybe you are getting an email, maybe you're getting a physical bill in the mail. Any information that you can provide, where somebody would find the actual bill and how to pay it could be there. If you're using a password manager, like a last pass or one password. You can actually put a lot of this information in there as well, and you can organize your passwords in there as bills.
So that would be an easy way for people to go in and login. Some things don't have logins though. So again, this is to help you keep track of, have one place to see all of the bills so you can, mark them off as you're paying them each month. And then of course the ones that are, yearly, you'll just, cross that off for that month, unless it's the actual month that you're going to pay it. This is to just keep structure of when things are due.
This can also help you see when things are coming in and if you need to call, some places will let you adjust the payment date. So if you need them to be more in line with your paycheck's coming in, if you're getting paid biweekly or monthly, and whatever the rough date is, you may want to change the payment date to help you. This is, if you don't have a lot of excess cash and you're pretty much spending what you have coming in.
So,that's one way of doing it. Obviously you can use project management systems, that will give you the reminders to pay, but if you're somebody that likes to pay bills, maybe once or twice a month. It's a lot easier to have it all in one spot than to constantly be like, oh, I got to pay my electric bill today.
Stop what you're doing and pay it. So if you're somebody that likes to bulk pay, then it's helpful to do this.
And as I'm talking about this, I think I might make it into a Google doc that I can share with you in the show notes. if it's not in the show notes, when you listening to this pop back in, it'll be there at some point. because I'm just thinking of this on the fly. Because I know I'm describing it, but sometimes it's visually easier to see it. Then, let's talk budgets.
Like I said, in the beginning, starting with knowing where all your money's going is really going to help you create a budget. you may need to do this for several months or, you may need to just look back because you're paying bills for a month that isn't going to take into account things that are quarterly. It's not going to take into count things that are semi-annual yearly and all of that. So you want to make sure that you are accounting for that when you're thinking about your budget.
So say for example, this month, your total bills were $2,000.
When that be nice. Then, you have 2000 coming in, you have 2000 going out. That's great, but what happens in a month where you're going to have more, so you want to make sure you're thinking ahead with that. I'll actually create a sample budget for you in this Google document as well. So you can see what I'm talking about there. I'm not going to give you tips on how to spread out, How much goes to what you need, how much goes to what you want and how much goes to savings, because, that's a whole nother story on financial planning and that isn't really what I'm here to do.
I'm here to help you. Organize so that when you go to talk to somebody about your finance, You have a really good idea of where you're at.
So if I was going to give you some action today, it would be start tracking where everything, where your money's going. Look at your bank statements, look at your credit cards, see what money you're spending and do an inventory.
It's like doing a food journal, I often say, do a food journal, do a time management journal. This is a financial journal of where your money's going. It doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to be digital. You can just write things down. It's really about being mindful where your money's going. And then the second thing would be to gather up all your bills.
you start creating this list of bills. so that you can get something in place that you can print out each month. Of course, things are gonna come up and you're gonna remember things and it's all adjustable. So I hope this was helpful. Bill pain can be very stressful. So when you do have it under control, it takes a little bit of a sting out of it.
And while I'm on the topic of this, because a lot of bills come in email, we want to have our email under control. So I encourage you to check out in the show notes as well. I'm going to have a link to my email program. And that program is all about taking control of your email inbox, which will help you, especially if you're getting a lot of bill notifications via email. So that's all I have for you today.
And as always, I'm wishing you much progress, peace, purpose, and the permission to be messy. Thanks for listening.