There’s no problem with wanting to pay them all at once, however, if you don’t keep track of where you put them, how do you know you have all the bills you need to pay?  This results in several missing bills and possible late fees, which we all know, leads to wasted money.

Some late fees may charge up to $40 a month depending on what it is, and that’s not even considering late credit card fees!  You should avoid giving this money away at all costs. Simple organization of your bills will help you keep track.

Keeping your Bills Looking Attractive and Less Business Like

Bills may not be an attractive thing to look at, but they still need to be paid. When you get your bills, first take them all out of the envelopes.  You will always lose your bills if they are still in the envelope since it’ll get mixed up with junk mail.  Once you have all your bills laid out, paper clip the ones with more than one page.  Put them together according to the most recent payment date, so that urgent bills are always on top.

Next, get an unused napkin holder and put the bills in there.  Find a designated spot to put the bills and always leave them there.  Near the phone is always a good location because you will frequently be in that area.  Make sure it’s at an eye-catching place as well so you’ll always be able to find your bills and know which bill you must pay first.

Remember that when you organize bills you don’t need a fancy solution.  You can pin them up on a post it board or use a paperwork rack that sites beside your home computer.  New bills go on the top, and paid bills on the bottom.

How do I File Bills that I’ve Already Paid?

The last step to organize bills is that after you’ve paid them, you’ll need to file them away somewhere just in case you need them for reference later, like during tax season.

Find an empty drawer around the house and get several folders.  Label the folders with the appropriate month and year, and start putting away all the bills you paid in the correct folder.  If you ever need to check when you paid a bill, you can always come to this drawer, and you also have a history of what has already been paid for so you don’t accidentally pay it twice.

If you want to take your organized bills one step further, you can designate different types of expenses.  Once you have created separate categories for your bills, you can file them by month.  If you are a home business owner this is especially useful, as when it comes tax time you can easily see how much you should be writing off as business expenses.

Return from Organize Bills to How to Organize your Life

This lesson in financial organization is geared towards those who are afraid of anything to do with budgeting money. The good news is that you will learn an amazingly easy way to do this. The goal here is to help you get organized and reach your financial goals. This means that you’ll be saving more money which can be used to help to clear up debt any debt you may have and also for saving and investing for the future. The difference with this budget system vs. other systems you may have tried in the past is that this one is simple, easy and painless.

Getting Started with Budgeting Money

Ok, the first thing that you will want to do is figure out how much money you need to live each month.

1. Calculate your housing and utility expenses first.

2. Next add up your food expenses as they would cost you to eat in your home.

If you can’t come up with an exact number, just use your best estimate. You can adjust these numbers over time. Try to be as accurate as possible.

3. Now, add any miscellaneous but necessary expenses such as gas to get to work and insurance for your car or home.

I say necessary because these kinds of expenses are necessary for living. Once you add up all of these things you should have a basic idea of your baseline cost of living. Knowing this number is very important no matter what kind of budgeting money plan you hope to use.

Notice that we didn’t include a category for things like your daily cup of coffee at Starbucks. We’ll get to that next.

Money Spent Outside the Home

So once you have your baseline cost of living, you will need to add a certain amount of extra money for things like coffee, dinners out, and entertainment like movies etc. Try and be realistic with how much you need to spend each month as you currently live your life. Now, once we know what this number is we’ll use psychology to do the rest….

…Here’s where the rubber meets the road with this budgeting money system…

Call to your bank and have them set up automatic deductions from your account. Each month when you receive your paycheck you will want them to transfer the entire amount into a ‘holding account’ that you can’t easily access except for the money you need for outside expenses like coffee, restaurants etc. For most people this means that the bulk of the money will go into a savings account, and the Outside money will go into your regular account.

This is the last step for setup before we get into actually putting this into practice – you can adjust the amount that gets placed into your Savings account as you see fit, but remember that the goal here is to reduce the amount of Money you spend outside of the home so that you can increase your personal wealth through budgeting money the easy way.

Putting the Plan into Action

Now, remove credit cards from your wallet and pay cash for everything using your ATM or debit card to get cash from machines whenever possible. Always print or at least view your balance from the ATM.

The effect that we should have here, is that instead of usually seeing a bank account that is flush with cash right after a paycheck, you should see a much smaller number. Psychologically this will help you to make better decisions about how to spend your money because we have removed the ‘wiggle room’ that you used to have and moved it into a savings account.

When your account balance reads $200 instead of $2000 it’s much easier to choose cheaper options. Perhaps you will start bringing your morning coffee from home, or opting to rent a movie with friends instead of going to the theater.

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