AR Bound

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in Finance for Mama

How to Pay Your Bills: Organizing Your Finances

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Hey y’all! I’m Meghan and welcome to my blog! Do you want to find out how to pay your bills in an organized and systematic way? Today I’ll show you the system I used to pay our bills! My husband left for a deployment and I was responsible for all our payments getting made on-time. Here’s how I kept it from being overwhelming, and how you can too!

Open up your bank account and any corresponding credit cards/accounts which anything may be auto-drafting from!

I like to get everything opened up and ready to be researched with as soon as I am ready. Think of everywhere you could possibly have something drafted from. In my case, this was my primary checking account and my credit card. Now that everything is open, you’re ready to chug along!

At this point, I like to open my Numbers program on my Mac and start a spread sheet!

I like to start from scratch so I don’t have to make my brain work with a template and edit it to do exactly what I want. The blank sheet will look like this.

Template window for spreadsheet building.
At this point you can double click the spreadsheet or press the create button.

Once open, your blank spreadsheet should look like this.

Blank spreadsheet called table 1.

I like to edit it down to two or three columns to keep my equations as simple as is possible! I don’t try to overcomplicate things. In order to remove columns, hover over the column letter and a down arrow will appear. Click the down arrow and select “Delete Column.” This is pictured below.

A table present with eight columns demonstrating how to delete a column.
I like to keep things simple, because knowing how to pay your bills is complicated enough as it is! Narrow your columns down to two or three.

You can also delete multiple columns at once, like this.

Table with eight columns and 22 rows. Five columns are selected and are being deleted with the drop down menu.
To eliminate multiple columns at once, press and hold your command key and select each column you want to delete, then hover over a selected column and press the down arrow. Select “Delete Selected Columns” and ta-da! You are in business.

When you are finished deleting extra columns, your spreadsheet should look something like the image below.

Table with three columns and 22 rows.

Now, let’s build our spreadsheet!

As I’ve said once or twice before, I like to keep things simple. So I just went through and plucked in each incoming and outgoing fund and here’s what I wound up with.

spreadsheet with three columns and 23 rows detailing a budget.
This is mocked up based on the average income of a 25 year old woman and the approximate amount she spends on rent. The rest is completely fictional and here for the purpose of demonstrating a potential budget. Don’t get stressed if this demographic is you and this mock up looks nothing like your finances. I made it up. 🙂

From here I like to use a formula to see how much money we have remaining. First, click a cell and press the “=” button. From there select every cell you want added up in that equation.

Table with 3 columns demonstrating how to use the equation box in numbers. This is to help people pay their bills.
This will give you the sum of these boxes. I like doing it this way because if a bill changes in amount, the only thing you have to edit is that individual cell. For example if your rent changes, you can edit that amount and not have to redo all your math.

I like to then subtract my incoming from outgoing to see how much is remaining.

Table with three columns picturing the fx box to solve for total money remaining.
This gives you your leftover amount! Now you know how much money is left over after you pay your bills.

A good way to make sure you pay your bills, on-time that is, is to know when they are actually due!

Now, after all my math is done, I like to go back and add a comment to each column, detailing when a bill is drafted and out of which account. You do this by selecting your category and pressing the comment button at the top right of your screen.

Photo demonstrating how to add a comment box to each category listed in the going out section. This is to help people pay their bills on time.

Now, based on your pay dates and withdraw dates, set reminders in your phone 5 days prior to each due date to pay your bills.

I like to set my due date for five days prior in order to set myself up for any unexpected delays with holidays or weekends so that my bill is always paid on time!

If you are recognizing that you have tons of money left over each month, check out my blog post about 10 Reasons Why You Should Pay off Your Debt! If you realize you have very little left over each month, you can go in and see where you can shave off some money.

I hope you learned an effective method for paying your bills on time! Thank’s as always for stopping by my blog.

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