Many of us spare a large portion of our monthly budget to pay bills. These bills could of for gas, water, or any other services that you use on monthly basis. Generally, every month you need to make the payment for these bills on a certain date and failing to do which you need to pay the late fees or penalty towards it. Hence it is important to stay organized and maintain discipline with your finances when it comes to making the payment for your bills. So how to make sure to pay your bills on time? Here are a few ways that would help you to make the payment on time.
Pay your bills online
Paying bills online will also help you to pay on time. There are various websites such as Deferit and mobile apps which provide you an option to pay bills online every month. This will help you to save the trouble of visiting the bill payment center and the time as well. Most of the time we tend to postpone making the payment for bills due to these reasons and end up getting charged late fees. Paying bills online would save you from late fees as well.
Prepare your monthly budget
As discussed above it is important to stay organized with your finances to pay bills on time hence the first tip would be to prepare the budget. Start preparing a detailed monthly budget to keep your bills organized. Make sure to include all the possible bills that you would need to pay in that particular month. Keep a record of each bill that you get so that end of the month you can track the payment of each easily. You might be getting annual or bi-annual bills as well for some of the services. Make sure to mention those bills as well in your monthly budget if the respective date falls in that particular month. You can also make use of various budget tools such as online mobile apps which help you to track every spend and also remind you of the bill payments every month.
Track your expenses
You do not wish to miss the due date of your bill and hence you try hard to pay it on time. But what if you get short of funds for the bill payment? This could happen to anyone of us. Hence make sure to see where you are spending the money. You can use online mobile apps to track expenses. The best free money management app to use is MoneyPatrol. It helps you track your spending regularly and update your budgets as you pay bills. If you are paying online for most of the expenses and if your bank account is linked to the budget app then it will record all the expenses and give you a glimpse of them. This would be the easiest way to track your additional or irrelevant expenses and manage your budget to pay your bills on time.
Organize the bills
Most of the time you get your bills through the mail but due to digitalization, most of the service providers decided to go paperless and started delivering the emails through email. Hence it has become easy now to organize the bills. Organizing the bills will help you to access them easily whenever you wish to pay. If you are getting online bills then you can create a separate folder in your email box to save these bills. If you are getting physical bills then make sure to reserve a space in your cupboard or wardrobe where you can store these bills for future reference. This will help you to access the bills easily and pay them on time.
Sign up for Auto Pay
If you decide to pay through internet banking then your bank will provide you an option of availing of the AutoPay facility as well. It is also known as the direct debit facility wherein the particular bill amount gets deducted from your bank account every month automatically. Here you would need to first register with your bank for the biller and then from the next month bank will start deducting money from your account every month. You can register all the billers with your bank for autopay service. This service is free and hence you do not need to pay anything to the bank for processing the payment. Since this transaction for bill payment gets done on the due date itself, you do not get charged for the late fees and hence you end up paying bills on time.