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My Precious Pennies

I will be AWAY until late February as we do this moving thing...again.

Ginger from Attention Target Shoppers & Tricia from 1stopmom
will be holding down the fort in the meantime - thank you so much, ladies!

Saturday, August 9, 2008

Declutter challenge day 9: bill paying!



I used to have a calendar on which I track when our bills are due, but that's a thing of the past now. My declutter challenge for today is to pay the bill the second I open the mail. Well, sort of. I should say I schedule the payment when I open the mail. I don't like to pay my bills until a couple days before the due date (hey, it's my money and we don't have tons of it, so I'm going to hang on to it for as long as I can!), so I schedule them a week or so into the future.

This has really helped out with our clutter. No more random bills or bright neon pink post-it notes as reminders. I immediately schedule the payment, write down the confirmation number, then file the bill away in my new filing system. Even if I forget when the due-date of a bill is, or some emergency comes up, it's not a big deal because the bill will pay itself.

That being said, I will never do the auto-pays. Scheduling a payment in advance is one thing, having the money being taken out of my account automatically is another. When I schedule a payment, I have already reviewed the bill and made sure everything is in order. If my bill is on auto-pay, I run the very high risk of the erroneous bill being paid before I get a chance to review it.

Sorry, no picture today - if I had a desk and it was previously set up to handle bills, I would show you what a huge clutter it was before my bill scheduling. However, the desk was broken and not set up, so the only thing I have to show is my...non-bill-paying system!

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