Many people organize their bills every month, when they receive them in the mail. We have never done anything like this. Recently, though, my husband and I had let our bills pile up (which we NEVER do!), and it was driving me nuts. It was driving me nuts, because we had this big stack of bills that we needed to sort through and I didn't have a clue what bills we had or what was due when. It's not just this time, it's every month that I don't know what we have because my husband pays most of the bills.
We have always had certain bills that each of us pay. This may not be ideal, but it's what works for us (for the most part) We both need to feel some sort of control and for us this was working, because it wasn't just ONE person controlling the money and paying the bills, which I know a lot of people that do it this way. BUT, we also never sit down together to pay bills. This is a problem for me only because my husband pays most of the bills (because he makes more money) and I don't have a clue when most of our bills are due or even what all bills we have.
So.......that's what led me to doing this. I decided to make a reference folder of ALL of our bills (ones that he pays AND ones that I pay) so that we can both look to this if we want to know what bills we have and when something may be due. This helps us both so that we don't necessarily have to sit down together to pay bills, but will still be able to know what all bills we pay and what the other pays.
a 1in. binder
clear page protectors
stick-on labels
FYI: You can purchase clear page protectors that come WITH the labels attached, but we weren't able to find any, so we just improvised.
What I did:
I slid a (most recent) copy of each one of our bills into a page protector. Then I labeled the top of each one accordingly. Example: The Sprint bill was labeled SPRINT, the Gas Bill was labeled GAS BILL, Etc. Next to the name of each bill I put a number. This number represents an estimated due date for each bill. I then placed each bill into the binder according to due date.
I basically created a cataloged list of our bills for us to use as a reference. This is helpful for us to use also because, it is a good filing system to use for old bills. There have been many times when we have wanted to look back at an old bill and either didn't have it or couldn't find it in our filing cabinet. We've tried saving our bills in a filing cabinet, but it's not all that convenient.
How do you sort your bills?
I like where you're going with this :)
ReplyDeleteWe have a file that our bills go into until paid. Once paid, they go into our metal filing cabinet (in the correct file, of course!).
Yeah, we probably still need a way to sort our bills as they come in, but I'll work on that ;)
ReplyDeleteFor now this took a load of stress off!
Thanks for sharing.