Day 20: Organizing Your Bills

I love my mom to death, but she is probably the most unorganized person I have ever met. I can remember growing up she would lose bills all of the time. Things would go unpaid because she would forget when things were due, and forget where she put the bill in the first place. She would just stuff them wherever was most convenient when she opened them; her purse, the door cubby in the car, coffee table.

I promised myself I would not do that!






So, when I first moved out on my own I came up with a very specific system, so detailed I question whether or not I am OCD (then I look at my house, and clearly I am not haha).

Whenever my bills would come, I would staple them together. It was nice because at this point I only had 3 bills.

Then once I paid the bill, I would staple the duplicate of the check to that months bills. The bills were filed in a...you guessed it...manilla envelope, with the most recent month's bills at the front. If I ever questioned or not something was paid, I simply had to find that months pile, and look.

That was a couple years ago. Since then I have discovered online banking, and online bill paying. Where had these been all of my life?

The first step was setting up a MyCheckFree account. You can enter all of your bills into one place and pay them there. They also send you emails whenever a new bill is posted.

Then I set up a folder in my email specifically for these emails.



Not only do the MyCheckFree Emails go here, but payment confirmations, etc. I never have to worry about if a bill is paid or not. All of this information is in one place.




This is day 20 of a 31 day series. To see the rest of the series, click here.