theHappyLifeofaHousewife: BILLS, BILLS, BILLS!!!

In our family, John pays our bills. He's just always felt like that was part of his "husband duty".

Johns system for paying the bills was pretty simple, a couple times a month, he would take the pile of bills & other mail, pay what needed to be paid of them, and put the rest of the pile back where he found it. We had piles of mail on our microwave & table at all times! I HATE piles!

So, I finally got desperate and decided I was going to find some sort of mail system that would work for the both of us... and here is what I came up with! : )

The "mail system" is pretty much as easy as can be! I went to the store and bought a binder & binder tabs with pockets. Then, I started labeling, created a couple documents, put the mail in the right pocket, and DONE! : )

This is what you see when you open the binder. I'm obnoxious and find indexes necessary.

The first page is our "Bill Payment Organizer".
The top chart has all of our automatic payments in it. We have quite a few payments that automatically come out of our account, I used this section to list their total & date.
The bottom section is bills that come to us by mail. When bills come in the mail, I open them & throw away all the extra junk they put in the envelope, write down the date & total the bill is due, and put it in the appropriate pocket. This way, when John opens the binder he can easily see what is due when & to who.

Each month I print out a calendar and put it in the binder. When bills come, I write the name of the company & total in the calendar on the date it's due. Every so often, John or I can look at the calendar and see what's due within the next couple days. I highlight anything that is automatic so we know we don't have to worry about paying that.

And these are all the tabs! : ) (I might have gotten a little carried away). I have two tabs for bills. One for bills that are due by the 15th of the month, and one for tabs that are due by the 30th of the month. The rest are tabs for things like our mortgage (any papers applying to our mortgage goes in this file), our bank account (statements, etc.), Johns notes (anything of his that I don't want to throw away), etc.