Every year people spend hours paying their bills, time that can easily be saved if these were paid automatically. If you are worried about not having a control over how much is taken out of your account, remember that since you are now tracking your expenses (see Day 1’s Challenge), this payment will sooner or later appear in your expense log anyway which will still give you an opportunity to check for errors.
Another strong argument to automate your payments is that it can potentially save you a substantial amount of money over the long run. Every time you are late paying a bill, you are charged a late payment fee and whilst you might have the intention to always pay your bills on time, the reality is that life happens and at one point or another you either forget, don’t have time or have much more pressing issues to deal with.
Today’s challenge is to go through all your bills that that you pay manually, contact the companies to find out how to automate your payment, then fill in any necessary documents and get this all sent off.
Whilst you are at this and as a bonus challenge for today you might also want to take a moment to decide whether you still want to receive copies of these bills by regular mail or rather in digital format if you find the amount of paperwork you are receiving getting out of hand a little. It might be easy to arrange this at the same time as you’re going through your bills.
Let the rest of us know at some point today on Facebook or Twitter (#31DayChallengeToFE). For more background reading have a look at step 15: Automate your Payments of the 100 Steps Mission to Financial Independence.
100 Steps Mission 