Transcript
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Hi.
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I’m Lorie Marrero, creator of the Clutter Diet book and on-line program, and today I
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have 10 tips for you to pay your bills more efficiently.
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[POP] That’s important because disorganization is very costly.
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Think of the time you spend not only finding your bills but chasing down the ones that
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you haven’t paid on time and paying the late fees and all of that.
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So let’s get that together.
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First, let’s make sure you have a home for your supplies.
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So I like to have a basket or a drawer or something with all of the bill-paying supplies
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you need.
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For example, rubber stamps, letter openers, pens and pencils, stamps, envelopes, all of
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those things that you use to pay your bills.
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Centralize that, have a little station for yourself to do this, because you do it all
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the time.
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Let’s automate that, let’s make a system.
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Second, decide what days you’re going to pay your bills and stick to them.
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So you can do whatever you want, you can have the first and the 15th are the days that you
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pay them, or you can pay them every other week, every Saturday.
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For a long time I paid my bills every single Tuesday.
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That really worked for me because I had an office day on Tuesdays.
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So whatever it is, make up your own schedule, but stick to it.
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And that’s going to give you peace of mind too, because if you know, “I’m paying my bills
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on this day,” you’re not going to have to have that floating around in your mind and
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worrying about it, because you know that you’re taking care of them on a regular basis.
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Third, keep your bills together as they arrive.
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So have a designated place for all the bills to go.
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When you sort the mail, you’ve got everything that needs to be paid all together.
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You can use a basket like this, you can use a letter sorter or a tray [POP], or even just
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a clothespin that you have on a magnet on your refrigerator.
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But wherever it is, have all those bills together so you know exactly where they are when it’s
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time to sit down and pay them.
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Next, I want you to think about automating all the bills that you possibly can.
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So anything that you can have a direct relationship with the vendor to be paid automatically out
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of your checking account, or onto a credit card, maybe you have a card that gets you
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airline miles, whatever you want to do, but just get that not to be a manual process for
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you.
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So you can rest assured that your [POP] cable bill is just going to get paid, your electric
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bill is going to get paid, without you having to worry about it or really do anything about
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it.
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Next, don’t handwrite checks unless you really have to.
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You can do a lot of bill- paying through most major banks on their web sites and they will
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send the check out for you.
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So sit down and type in something instead and hit “send” and you can usually even post-date
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when you want them to send that check out so you can pay the bills ahead of time that
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way.
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But, how much easier is that?
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You don’t have to have a stamp or an envelope, you don’t have to write the address down,
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usually you’re going to have all of those in a system where you pay them regularly anyway.
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So get that all done on-line and avoid handwriting.
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Also, it’s a little bit more secure if you don’t leave handwritten outgoing checks in
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your mailbox to risk them getting stolen and having an identity theft problem.
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The next thing you want to think about is consolidating all of your bills and credit
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cards as much as possible.
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So instead of having a whole bunch of different department store and gas station credit cards,
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why not cancel almost all of those and just get one or two major credit cards and use
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those for everything?
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And that way you have fewer accounts and fewer bills.
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You also might want to get some rubber stamps made.
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This, again, is a process that you do over and over again, you want to make a system
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for it.
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So if you’re always writing “for deposit only” with your bank account number, have a stamp
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made with that on it.
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[POP] Sometimes you might like having a stamp like this one is that says “paid” and then
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you can change the date on it.
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So that enables you to quickly stamp things [POP] and know that you’ve paid them on a
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certain day.
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A lot of people ask me about keeping bills.
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Now, for a business, you need to keep every receipt and every invoice, no question.
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For your personal life, it’s really not that necessary usually to keep every receipt for
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every pack of gum that you’ve purchased or anything.
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But you might want to keep some of the bills for your records about your utilities.
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If you do want to file your bills, what we find in usually the most efficient is an accordion
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file like this.
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So this is already pre-marked January through December and you just pay your bills and stick
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them in the appropriate month and go on.
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And at the end of the year you can bundle this up in a big bow and you’re done and you
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start a new one for the next year.
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[POP] Much easier than trying to create separate files for separate vendors and parse every
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single one of those bills out into every file every month.
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Usually that is not a necessary way to do it and you can find whatever you need by looking
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it up by month.
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I want you to also think about going paperless as much as possible.
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And the perfect combination is automated and paperless.
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So the bill’s automatically drafted and then you get an e-mail saying, “This is how much
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you paid,” and then you can file an attached PDF statement or something electronically
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and not have to file the paper.
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So going paperless is a great way to reduce the amount of file cabinets that you need
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and the amount of processing time that you have and simplify things greatly.
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I also want to encourage you, just in general, to organize your wallet and organize your
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purse — and we do have a great video about purse organizing — but one of the things
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you want to do on bill-paying day is probably pull out all the receipts out of your wallet
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and purse and process those and put them into your bank software, like Quicken or something,
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so you can make that day of the week that you pay bills be the day that you clean out
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your purse or wallet and you’ve got a little habit hook there.
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We’ve got videos about that too.
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I hope you’ve enjoyed these tips, and I hope your bill-paying gets much more efficient
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and you save a lot of money.
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Until then, I hope you will check out our Home Office Handbook.
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This is a book I have all about the home office that includes these tips and many more.
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You can see a lot about that at http://www.clutterdiet.com/homeoffice.
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See you next time, and may you always be happy and grateful for having more than enough.