How To Manage Your Monthly Bills

You get pulled in a million different directions on a daily basis. There’s pressure at work, family obligations, and oh yeah, those pesky bills.

If you start noticing late fees rolling in, you need to figure out how to manage your monthly bills so you only pay what you owe, and not fees that you’d rather avoid.

Tips To Help Get Your Bills In Order:

Make A List

Spend a month writing down every bill that comes in, when it arrives, and when it is due. You’ll want to include utilities, mortgage, credit cards, and anything else that comes through on a regular basis.

You can use an app, a spreadsheet, or even just a simple notebook. That will help you keep track of the bills that come in and you can use it (and the due dates) as a checklist to make sure you get things in on time.

It’s also a good foundation for building a budget for your family.

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Get Organized

If you grab the mail and throw it on the counter, only to let it get buried in schoolwork, dinner, and a variety of other things, you could lose bills or, at the very least, miss timely payments. You need to organize your bill paying system.

Put bills, either hard copies or if you’re paying bills online, in a certain location when they come in and set a time each week to sit down and go through them. You can find them easily and ensure they’re paid at the right time.

Streamline Payments

It can be stressful to do all of the things you have to do in a day, including paying your bills. If you can streamline even parts of the process, it can really help you get the payments in on time.

Look at https://www.bills.com (a manage bills app) for advice and details on what you might want to try. For example, you can set up automatic payments for any account that you can connect directly to your bank.

You don’t have to do a thing but make sure the money is in the right place at the right time. You can also have some bills go to your credit card to rack up points–as long as you are able to pay the credit card off each month.

These automatic payments take the heat off you and ensure that your bills are paid at the right intervals.

Review Statements

Even though most of your bill paying might be done in an automatic manner, you’re going to want to keep an eye on the statements when they come in. Check the due dates to make sure they are the same. See if there are any increases in certain fees so you can ask about those.

You’re going to want to stay familiar with the prices you’re charged as well. If you see a big jump in your utilities, for example, you might have an energy leak in the house that you want to identify and plug.

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Bills are something everyone would love to avoid, but they’re one of those things that just keep on coming, no matter how much you would like to ignore them.

Instead of letting them pile up and ramping up late fees and interest rates, you’ll have to figure out how to manage your monthly bills. It can take a little while to get organized and figure out what kind of a budget you want to put into place, but it’s easier to go through that process than it is to dig yourself out of a debt that you can avoid.