Frugal Wife » bills

Annual Credit Report

frugalwife — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 21:42:15 +0000

If you haven’t already, I recommend getting your free credit report. By law, you’re allowed to view your credit statement one time per 12 months. The website is: http://www.annualcreditreport.com.

This is not your credit score, but instead gives you a list off all the accounts that are open in your name. For an extra $5 to $10 each, you can get your actual credit score from one (or all) of the credit bureaus.

The Value of Online Accounts

frugalwife — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:41:45 +0000

I’m kind of astounded by how many companies these days give you the ability to view your account online. It’s not just banks and financial institutions that have online presences. I’ve even got an online account with my electric company and they allow me to input my exact usage on the months that they do an average of usage. My amount due is there and I can even pay my bill online.

I highly recommend that if pay a bill to a company, look to see if you can check out your account online. My student loans are a great example as well. It allows me to make an extra payment and choose to have it all go to Principle. I may not make that extra payment if I’ve got to cut a check for it and then *hope* it gets credited to the principle balance.

Monthly Financial Meeting

frugalwife — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 16:16:53 +0000

If you’re a reader of any of the more popular Personal Finance blogs out there, you’ve probably read about doing a monthly financial meeting. I don’t want to go over the same things that have been spoken about in the past but just want to emphasize how good this is for a healthy marriage or relationship.

I think that this is especially necessary if only one of you pays all the bills. It’s a way for the other person in the relationship to understand what’s happening and lightens the stress on the person paying the bills. For my husband and I, it’s a time when we sit for an hour and only discuss financial stuff. I’ve even been known to ban laptops from the room so we can focus. I typically put together a little list of stuff ahead of time as I think of it and then we talk about those items. At some point we typically end up talking about our future goals and what we’d like to see for ourselves in the future. Sometimes we talk about the next year or two and sometimes we talk about five years down the road and sometimes we talk about life after retirement. It has become a way for us to hear the other person’s goals and align the dreams for our future into one picture. The point is that it’s a time when we focus only on things related to finances and our future, nothing else comes into the conversation.

I control the bills; bills don't control me!

frugalwife — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 22:40:14 +0000

In the past 2 years or so I’ve taken over the bulk of the bill paying and finance planning from my husband. He started a company with a friend and working on that and his 9-5 job started taking up too much of his time. Besides that, I love playing with numbers. I thoroughly enjoyed my accounting courses in college and my time working as a bank teller.

My husband and I started using the Envelope system of budgeting after we bought our new house in 2006. At it’s simplistic this means that in order to purchase anything, you have to have the money in the bank first. This seems like a ‘duh’ thing for some people but we just seemed to be struggling with it. We kept having things creep up that would inevitably make it so that we had an ‘IOU’ in the envelope. That starts to get extremely frustrating after a while.

In the past year or so, I’ve started creating Envelopes for any purchase that I can predict. For example, you know that you’re going to have to buy new tires for your car every 5 years or so. So if your tires cost you $500 over 5 years, that’s $100 a year or $8.33 a month. I’ve started putting away $8 or 9 a month every month so that when the time comes to get new tires, we’ll be ready.

Getting started with this is a little tricky. Say you bought tires 2 years ago, you’ll have to save that $500 over 3 years instead of 5. I put together a spreadsheet of items like that so it was easier to see the math. The columns I created were: Item Name, Total Cost of Item, Number of Months till Needed, Cost per Month. The only column that has an equation in it is the “Cost per Month” column. The equation is “Total cost” divided by “Number of Months”.

A byproduct of this is that we’re now able to save more consistently. Because we have money already set aside for our large purchases, we’re not scamming money out of the Emergency fund to try to cover these bills. It also gives you a little peace of mind to know that when the time comes and you need to make that purchase, the money is already there.

How I do it: Paying Bills on Time

frugalwife — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 22:32:14 +0000

I was chatting with a friend on New Year’s Eve and he mentioned in passing that he had this one bill that he was consistently forgetting to pay and incurring a late fee. I mentioned to him how I keep track of when my bills are due and he seemed to think it was a neat idea so I thought I’d share it here.

It was an idea born of laziness more than anything else. I needed a calendar system with the ability to create recurring appointments with reminders that both my husband and I could see. Filling out a paper calendar with each bill on each month seemed like a little too much. We had recently started using a Google Calendar to keep track of appointments and travel plans when my husband suggested I create a second one for bills. It turns out this is the perfect solution for us.

So here’s a few of the technical details…

You need a Gmail account (or an email account hosted by Google). You should automatically get access to Google Calendar when the account is created. There’s an ability to create multiple calendars under that single account. I created appointments under the newly created calendar that recur monthly. I set the appointment for a few days prior to it’s due date so I’ve got some time to pay it. The items that can’t be paid online (which is only 1 for me), I set a reminder notice in the appointment and it emails me a week prior to the due date so I remember to mail the check. This can also be done with other bills you find yourself forgetting.

I even put the bills on the calendar that are autopaid. I’ll title the appointment “Electric – autopaid” so I know it’s one of the autopaid bills. It’s one of the ways I keep track of what’s coming so I’m never short on funds or surprised by a bill. Because I’ve got a terrible memory once I’ve paid a bill, I update that calendar notice to say “paid” at the end so that I know I’ve paid it. When you edit the notice it will give you a few options for changing the appointment and I just select “This Instance”. That makes it so that it only changes the specific day you’re on and not all the future or past appointments. This gives you the “quick check” that you need to know if you’ve paid all your bills. I just do a quick scan of the calendar to see if there’s anything that doesn’t have a “paid” or “autopaid” in the next week or 2 that needs to be paid.

It’s a little time consuming to setup but once you’ve got it the way you need it, it doesn’t require any upkeep.

Please leave questions in the comments section if you have them and I’ll clarify as necessary.