Bills, Bills, Bills!

Nobody, and I mean NOBODY likes bills! What is worse than bills?
Forgetting a bill!
When a bill is forgotten, you end up with late fees or if the bill is auto-drafted from your
account, it can cause overdraft fees...
Yeah, nobody likes bills.

I know there are many methods to staying organized as far as bills go, but this is my way.
FIRST;
Make sure you have all of your bills, websites, usernames, passwords, account numbers as well as the company phone number.
Believe me, you WANT the company phone number for those little instances where the power is out, the internet isn't working, or any other little mishap that makes contacting a bill collector difficult.
SECOND;
Get some 3x5 or 5x7 index cards WITH lines.
THIRD;
Put the bill NAME and ACCOUNT number on the TOP of the FRONT.
FOURTH;
Write the company phone number, the company web address, your username and password to access your account on the BACK of the card.

 Start with LAST month's bill amount and date it was due, how it was paid, whether it was via Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT), online Bill Pay (BP), mail, by phone, etc.
The day you paid it or it is scheduled to come out.
Once it comes out of my bank account, I put a check mark to the right of it to let me know it has come out and if it is different than the EFT date, I put the date it actually came out on. For example, my security bill says due on the first of the month, but it usually doesn't come out until the 3-7th of the month. This lets me know that if pay day falls on the 2nd-5th of the month, chances are I will be able to have that bill come out of that paycheck instead of the previous one.
Dig so far?

If you already know the exact amount and the exact date a bill will be paid via EFT, you can write it out a few months in advance.
WARNING! Don't write out the whole year, you never know what may need to change, so just do 2-4 months at a time if you "plan ahead."
Ok, so:
Biller Name
Account #
Biller website
Username and Password to access your account online.

OH!!! My! I forgot to tell you:
When WRITING DOWN YOUR PASSWORD!!!
DO NOT WRITE DOWN THE ENTIRE PASSWORD!
So what I do is:
Say my password is Johnny31
I am going to write the ones I absolutely need to know to remember the password:
J****##
Or more commonly seen on mine is:
J............##

Say it is is jOhnnY31
I am going to put
*O**Y##
or
....O......Y##

This tells me what are caps and what are numbers.
The rest you need to remember on your own.
Remember those security questions? You can write those down on the back of these as well. So say I said my security answer was "Pony"
I can write P...

It is important to NOT write down the entire password or security answer.
Make sure (and this is something quite honestly I need to actually DO)
Make sure your S.O. knows what these stand for in case you, the bill payer, are unable to take care of bills.
I realized recently that as I am the billpayer, my husband has NO clue how to do it or the slightest idea on how to do this. Even when I had known I was about to give birth, I set it all up, he never had to do a thing.
He would be lost without me! LOL!

Last thing I do is take a clothes pin or some sort of office clip and write "Bills" on them. You can have one clip for "Pay Now" and "Pay Later" but I find that if I move all the bills I just paid to the back of the stack, it leaves the ones that need paying the soonest in front.
So far  this system has kept me sane and kept all of our bills on time and up to date.
It is helpful for me to have a calendar nearby noting when paydays take place.

I would LOVE  for the day to come when I can just pay bills the day they are due and never have to worry about there being enough to cover them.
BUT, this is reality and I don't know anyone who is able to do this.

Good luck and remember, if you have bills, it means you HAVE something. Home, car, insurance, phone, whatever your bill is, means you have something and something is much better than NOTHING.

Until next time,
Jennifer (Mom of 5)
YOU CAN DO IT!