Beating Broke

Personal Finance from the Broke Perspective

4 Ways to Make Sure Your Bills Get Paid On Time

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You’re busy.  I get it.  I’m busy, too, and sometimes I forget to sit down and pay my bills in a timely manner.  However, I don’t want a ding to my credit score.  Because I’m so busy with my kids and their many activities, and L.I.F.E., I use several strategies to make sure my bills get paid on time.

Here are some of my favorite strategies:

Set e-mail reminders.

For each of my credit cards, I have set up e-mail reminders.  Depending on the company, I’m sent an e-mail reminder six to 10 days before my payment is due.  I can’t tell you how many times these e-mail reminders have meant the difference between a late and on-time payment.  Everyone should set e-mail reminders for their bills, in my opinion, especially if you have a very busy schedule.

Set up recurring payments to your credit card.

While I generally avoid setting up recurring payments to my checking account, I do advocate setting up recurring payments to credit cards.  Why?  If a charge is fraudulently applied to your credit card, the credit card company protects you.  If the same thing happens to your checking account, your entire account could be emptied, and then you would miss other payments to other creditors and have to pay for bounced checks.

In addition, if you have a credit card with a rewards program, you could gain rewards simply for paying your monthly bills that you used to pay via check and snail mail.  Those points can add up quickly when you’re paying your monthly recurring bills with credit cards.  Just make sure to pay off your credit card each month.

Set up a special account for automatic payments from your savings or checking.

If you still prefer to set up automatic payments to your bank account, I’d suggest setting up a separate account just for automatic payments.  Then, if there is an error on the vendor’s part, you don’t risk paying overdraft fees on your regular checking account.

I have one account that is devoted solely to automatic payments for my husband’s student loans and our life insurance (the only two payments I have set to auto pay from our bank account).  These are both fixed expenses, so at the beginning of every month, I just schedule a transfer to that account so the payments can be deducted.  Since I don’t use this account for any other purpose, there is no worry about not being able to make other payments or bouncing checks.

Keep all of your bills in one place.

If you’re still receiving bills in the mail rather than electronically, keep all of your bills in one place.  If you use snail mail, also keep stamps there.  Then, when you’re ready to sit down to pay your bills, you have everything you need right in one place.

What are your strategies to make sure your bills get paid on time?  What suggestions would you add to this list?

Simple Ways to Save Even When Money Is Tight

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For the 15 years my husband and I have been married, we’ve always shared just one car.  Actually, most of the time I’ve been the one with the car—first because I had to drive to work while he could easily take the train, and, once I became a stay-at-home mom, because I usually had the kids that I needed to transport while he could commute by public transportation.

While he’s been a good sport about this situation, the time has come to finally buy another car that he can use.

The problem?  We don’t want to take out a car loan because doing so would create a serious strain on our budget.  We want to pay cash instead.

But how do you save money for a car when you feel like there’s absolutely NO wiggle room in your budget?  Here are the strategies we’re using.

Save Cash Back from Credit Cards

Our credit card regularly gives us cash back.  For the first three months of 2016, we’ve earned just shy of $150 in cash back.  If we continue at this pace, we’ll have an extra $600 in cash back thanks to using, and paying off, our credit card each month for as many purchases as we can.

Save Whenever You Receive Discounts on Regular Expenses

This is my favorite way to save because there are so many opportunities to save this way!

For instance, at Christmas, we received a postcard from our car repair shop offering 10% off our next car repair.  I held onto that, and just last week we had a $284 car repair.  We saved $28 thanks to the postcard, and that money went right in our car fund.

We took a vacation recently and stopped by Denny’s on our last day when we had eaten up all the food we had brought with us in the cooler.  Our total was $39, but for some reason, the cashier decided to give us a $6 discount.  I put that money right in our car fund.

Our grocery store gives fuel rewards points for shopping.  For every $100 spent in groceries, you get 10 cents off your next gallon of gas.  If you buy a gift card, your reward points are for double that amount.  I send any of those savings to our car fund.  Just today I put 19 gallons in my tank, and I got 20 cents off per gallon.  I put that $3.80 into our car fund.

Save Change or a Specific Bill

I don’t use this strategy anymore because we typically use credit cards for our purchases, but when I was using cash a lot, I never spent the change and earmarked it all for a specific fund.  One time, I went several months saving all of the $5 bills I got and used them to pay down debt.

To be sure, none of these savings strategies is growing our car fund at an impressive rate.  However, we ARE saving something using ways we save in our everyday lives.  We’re consciously, physically setting aside our savings, which is a great way to save when your budget is tight and you feel like you have no wiggle room.

Do you save like this?  If so, what are your favorite strategies?

 

Is It Time to Give Up Your Debt Free Dream?

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From the time my son was three, I’ve been a big Dave Ramsey fan.  When my youngest children were young (two under two), I quit my job to stay home with our three kids.  We decided to get gazelle intense with our debt.  Since my husband was working part-time and attending graduate school, that meant I had to work from home.  Work I did.  I worked a lot, and I compromised my health.

While we reduced our debt a lot, we never got debt free.

Then we had a cross-country move.

We also had significant medical bills this last year when one of our children had a medical crisis, the treatments of which were not all covered by insurance.

Our income, while more than it was years ago when I was gazelle intense, has never really grown much.

My husband and I were talking about finances recently, and I mentioned that I’d like to get gazelle intense again.

But, my husband, not so much.

Give up on your debt free dream
Is there a better way?

He sees our children growing up, and he doesn’t want to work, work, work trying to pay off debt.  Instead, he wants to spend more time with the kids, take vacations with them, and just enjoy them before they fly the nest.  As fast as time is going, that will be all too soon.

Turns out, my husband is not alone in this sentiment.

Recently, I stumbled upon a Daily Worth article where the author’s husband felt exactly as mine did.  He didn’t want to spend all of his time working and penny pinching, not enjoying life, in the hopes that he would one day be debt free.  The author writes of her husband, “He didn’t want to wait another five years to take our first family vacation.  He didn’t want to give up a decade of our lives in order to live my extreme version of the American dream.  He wanted a house in a better neighborhood that was actually big enough for our family.  He wanted to spend some of the money he had worked so hard for.  He was done.”

So, too, is my husband.

That doesn’t mean we’re going to go crazy spending.  What it does mean is that we will save money to take a vacation with our kids.  (The only vacations we’ve ever had were when we took the kids along when my husband attended conferences.  I took the kids to see fun things while my husband worked—not exactly a family vacation.)

We’ll finally start putting money in the kids’ college funds, and we’ll also start funding our Roth IRAs.  (We didn’t want to do these two things until we became debt free.)

My husband is expecting a substantial raise soon, and we will use some of that money to pay down debts, but we’ll also use some of that money to enjoy now.  After all, you’re never guaranteed tomorrow. . .or retirement.

If you’re in debt, is your goal still to be 100% debt free, or are you choosing to live and enjoy your life now while paying down debt?