bills | Online Savings Blog

How to Prepare For Once-in-a-While Expenses
07.29.08 | Money Management | 0 Comments | by junger

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Everyone has those once-in-a-while expenses that require some planning and preparation in order to pay: car insurance (once or twice a year), yearly dues or memberships, and even taxes.

They're a bit odd because they're not recurring monthly bills, so you're not always thinking about them, but when they hit, they can hit pretty hard.

Here's the easiest way to prepare for those once-in-a-while expenses: automatically set aside money to pay those bills once a month.

By setting up a new online savings account or an ING subaccount, you're establishing a fund solely for these once-in-a-while expenses. Rather than having these bills take a big chunk out of your checking account once or twice a year (which itself requires creatively moving money around), the money is coming from a separate location.

But you still need to feed these accounts — and the easiest way to do it is to make your big once-in-a-while expense a bunch of little monthly expenses.

Got a $1200 car insurance bill you know comes every January 1? Set your new account to automatically transfer $100 from your main checking every month. That way, when the bill lands at your door, you've already paid for it.

You may find it works better to have one account for each once-in-a-while bill or to have a once-in-a-while slush fund, where you transfer the total amount of those bills (divided by 12) each month.

Whichever way you choose, the point is the same: by automatically setting aside the money for these bills, it's like you've already paid for them.
How Paying By Check Cost Me Money
01.31.08 | Money | 4 Comments | by junger

One of the last bills I actually pay by check is my credit card, and it's come to bite me in the ass.

When we moved back in November, I changed my address with the credit union where I have my credit card. But apparently, Visa never updated it in their systems.

So even though I got my first two bills thanks to mail forwarding, my last two bills never came.

Because I didn't get my bills, I didn't pay my bills. Now I've got a past due notice and some finance charges sitting on my balance.

Thanks, Visa.

I called up the credit union, and they have my new address in the system, so they're blaming Visa. Thankfully, they're looking into getting the finance charges removed and I'm paying the bill right now.

If I had automatic payments set up for my credit card, this wouldn't have happened. My bill would have been paid, and I wouldn't need to take time to straighten this out and worry about any repercussions.

free website hit counter