Organizing Resolutions for the New Year
Written by Jen Doyle
The first month of the year is gone and for most of us so are our resolutions!
If you are one who vowed to avoid the nagging of unopened bills and eliminate pesky late charges, here are a few tips to help keep your resolutions:
1) Go through your mail each day. After a long day at work it feels nice to come inside, take your jacket off, and throw the mail into a pile. Stop. It takes less than five minutes to go through your mail and make the pile much less overwhelming. Throw out or recycle all of your junk mail immediately, put your magazines in a convenient place where you will be able to read them and put your bills together.
2) Keep all of your bills in the same place, whatever is best for you. A basket, a folder, or a certain corner of your counter or desk.
3) Don't separate bills into different folders. Put them all together in the same file so that you don't have to search through ten different folders looking for a bill. Having them all together means none will be overlooked.
4) Set aside a half an hour each week or every other week to pay your bills. Mark a date on your
calendar for this job. You can schedule it around a pay period or perhaps the 1st or 15th of each month. This way you don't have to put aside everything because the cable bill came.
5) Pay yourself first. Open a savings account and put a set amount, 10% of your pay or as little as $10 each pay, into that account. You will never miss it and you will never regret it.
6) There are lots of inexpensive money management software products that are available and easy to learn. They are great time-saving tools to track your finances throughout the year. Be prepared when the dreaded tax time arrives.
Use these tips to accomplish the bill paying resolution once and for all!
In February's edition I will write about kitchen organizing and how it can add up to big savings at the grocery.
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