When you sit down to do it yourself, you’ll see how all of these pieces come together. I promise, it’s not as complicated as it looks. I’m going to lay out for you exactly how we implemented this system with our own bills and bank account. If you’re sold on this method by now, keep reading. These charges add up to roughly $50 per month, so instead of just paying the $200 minimum payment on our Discover card monthly, I take $250 divided by 4 weeks in a month, and pay $62.50 per week. Instead of forgetting about these charges like I used to do every month and letting them add to the debt on the card, I simply added these to the minimum payments that are being auto-debited from our bank account. I also use this method to pay off recurring monthly charges to make sure they don’t add to our debt load.įor example, our Netflix, Microsoft, and Groovebook accounts draft monthly from our Discover card. This works perfectly for credit card bills, personal loans, car payments, and even utility bills. This means that even though we’re paying the same amount of money every month and doing it in a way that makes our finances easier to handle, we’re actually saving money on bills. It turns out, paying our bill weekly like this instead of just making one payment every month would actually save us in interest charges. I called the Discover card company to tell them my plan and to ask a few questions about how our interest was calculated. I did this for all of our minimum payments and realized it would make our lives SO much easier to pay an even amount of money every week. So that $200 minimum payment meant 4 equal payments of $50 could be made weekly to meet our minimum. Then, I made a separate column and divided the total due by 4. I made an Excel spreadsheet of all of our minimum payments and due dates, but you could easily do this using a paper ledger like this one. It helped us live comfortably on a tight budget. I realized being strategic with not just how we spent our money, but how we paid our bills was key. If we had money to spare every month, I wouldn’t have noticed such a drastic dip in our financial stress.Īfter we implemented this bill pay system, it seriously felt like we’d been given a pay raise. Honestly, I think this system works best because we were on a tight budget. We decided on weekly payments even though my husband gets paid every 2 weeks. My reasoning was that if we had a $200 minimum payment due once a month, we should easily be able to afford $50 per week. I gave in and scheduled everything to come out of our account automatically. Definitely not how you want to spend your money when trying to get out of debt. Even incurring late charges a couple of times. Initially, I was worried about giving companies access to our bank account.Īfter trying to pay all of our bills weekly, I realized I had missed some. What finally worked for us was dividing up our payments and scheduling them to be automatically deducted from our bank account. Some of our creditors gave us the option of moving our due date, but this wasn’t enough. Then, that one week would roll around and suddenly our bills demanded more of our money than we had in our bank account to offer. We’d have those weeks where it looked like there was a lot left over after the bills were paid, so we’d go out to dinner or over spend on groceries. If we were careful with our expenses, my husband’s income was enough for us to make ends meet.Įvery month we went through the same thing. On paper, it looked like we had enough coming in to cover all of our minimum payments… plus a little left for gas and food. It finally occurred to me that if I could just divide up our payments, we wouldn’t have to risk going in the hole every month. When I figured out this budget hack, it felt like we had somehow discovered money we didn’t know we had. I didn’t even want to look at our debt or when bills were due because it felt like a surefire way to get depressed and anxious. If we weren’t careful though, we could easily be left with no choice but to dip into our savings on that one week a month when so much was due.īuilding a family budget on one income is daunting and overwhelming. Some weeks, it seemed like we had plenty of money left over. If your monthly budget looks anything like ours, you have at least one week where it seems like all of the big bills are due all at once. Finally, I got fed up with feeling out of control and I figured out a bill pay hack to make the same monthly payments but actually save money on interest every month. Instead, we were looking for ways to save money on bills. When we went from being a two-income family to a one-income household with a baby, the days of easily paying the bills on time, let alone paying off debt, seemed like a distant memory.
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