Are you getting late fees on your bills? Is paying your bills a source of frustration for you? Having a plan to pay on time can save you a headache, and it can get you on the right path to keep your finances in order. This step-by-step guide can help you strategize your approach to making sure you’re in the driver’s seat when it comes to paying your bills.
List out your bills
The first step to taking control of your bills is making sure you have a list of services and expenditures that you have. This includes rent or mortgage payments, credit cards, utilities, services or anything you would pay out each month. You can use anything to make a list, but you’ll want to be able to keep track of your bills over the year, so a spreadsheet or an app might work better than a notebook, but the medium isn’t as important as making sure your list is detailed.
Create specific places for bills
Whether your bills come to you in paper or digitally, it’s important to store them where you’ll have easy access to them when you need them. For your paper bills, that might mean keeping them in the same physical spot until it’s time to pay them. Digital bills should also be separated and stored in a spot on your device where you won’t lose track of them.
Open your bills
This might seem obvious, but for many people, opening a bill can cause automatic anxiety, especially if that person knows they’re behind on their obligations. But, unless you open that bill, you won’t know if the company is charging you a fee of some kind. It’s also important to review your bills for accuracy.
Know when your bills are due
Knowing when your bills are due is a key strategy to staying ahead of your due dates. Many bills are due at the first or the middle of the month, but not all of them will be. If your due dates are spread out too much, you could reach out to the businesses you’re working with to see if you can consolidate your payments to dates that will work with your budget better.
If your bills align with your paycheck dates more closely, you might have an easier time making payments, and that can relieve some of the stress of your bills.
Check to see if you have grace periods
Despite best efforts, sometimes a payment may be late. Maybe you forgot the bill was due, you were out of the country, or any number of things could have intervened to prevent you from paying. If that’s the case, it’s worth reviewing your paperwork to see if you have a grace period after a missed payment before you accrue late fees, have your late payment reported to the credit bureaus, etc.
Schedule specific time to pay your bills
Whether you sit down to pay your bills once a week or once a month, it’s important to put time into your schedule to pay them. With a designated time to pay your bills set on your calendar, you eliminate a big roadblock to paying your bills on time. Plus, it won’t take very long if you have a date set every week.
Use the easiest option available
Paying bills is stressful for most people, so to reduce some of the stress of paying, many companies have made things convenient and simple for people to pay. Whether you’re paying through an app, using automatic payments through your bank account, making a phone call to an automated system or simply sending a check to your creditor, pay them the way you feel is most convenient for you and with luck, you won’t be as stressed.
Monitor your bills
With this guide, hopefully you’ve set up some good habits that will help you get your bills paid each month. But it’s worth noting that once you set up those good bill-paying habits that you should still pay attention to your bank accounts, as well as your monthly statements from your creditors.
If you’ve set some of your bills to automatic payments, you should monitor your bank account each month to make sure the correct amount is being withdrawn. You should also be checking your bank account to make sure you have enough money in it to cover your bills, as many banks will charge overdraft fees if your bank account comes up a little short.
Stick to it
Now that you’ve got a plan to take control of your bills, the hardest part will be to earn the money you’re going to pay out to your creditors. If you follow some of the tips in this guide, you should be able to take the sting out of paying bills every month, and that, in turn, could help you achieve your idea of financial freedom in the long term, as timely payments reflect positively on your credit report.
