For the majority of my life I have really struggled with keeping track of bills.  It sort of goes back to the fact that in their natural state, my organization skills consist of at best piling everything into one giant pile to be “sorted later.”

Every time I try and organize mail or a stack of papers, I end up with either 1 stack, or 10,000 stacks which in the end are combined into (you guessed it) one giant stack.  I think my ability to categorize might be broken.

As you can imagine, inability to organize papers has a slightly negative effect on keeping track of bills.  “I know I remember putting in here somewhere” is a thought that I have had more in my adult life than I like to reflect on.

As far back as six years ago I heard people talk about auto bill pay but I honestly never put much thought into it because it either 1) cost monday or 2) I was scared of money being auto pulled.  Now that I am settled in, out of college, married, and have a one year old I am realizing that…hey, my expenses are the same every month, and man is it a pain to call and pay 10 different bills.  This coincides with the fact that recently Wells Fargo started offering online bill pay.

I took the plunge…and I love it. I get paid and my money automatically goes where it is supposed to go; bills, savings, checking, thin air.  Ok the thin air one is the part that goes into checking.  No late payments, no late fees, no forgetting anything, no overspending just steady as she goes.  I will say this, I highly recommend centralized autopay.  I can imagine many scenarios where I had things automatically pulling from my account and magically disappearing into thin air for years after I meant for them to stop.  That one bit aside, I love logging in and seeing a nice list of my bills and ‘paid’ next to all of them.  Except Qwest which likes to reject autopayments because, well, qwest has the worst customer service in the history of man kind.  Just google qwest customer service sucks and you can read for days.

All said, auto bill pay lives up to it’s billing (I know, har har). Now go forth and autopay!

A bunch of the personal finance bloggers I know are doing a little segment called “whats in your wallet” so I figured I would join in too because after all my Wallet needs a good cleaning. So without further ado:

The Start:

Notice it is stuffed full of junk. So I went about cleaning it up. I have to say I have a TON of cards and stuff. A rather intimate look at my life. Sorry though, no credit card numbers, as much as I would love to have one of the spambots come by and pick that up. So just going through got health insurance card, pre-paid mastercard I wont at the company Christmas party LAST year that has $1.11 left on it that I cant see to use but won’t let myself throw away. Next a noodles frequent diner card that I have had for probably 5 years now (and never use). King Soopers card, vital. Platinum credit card from my credit union, beer tour card from old C’s, an old card insurance card, big city burrito card (these are probably the best burritos in the world, I could eat one a day if it wouldn’t make me fatter than Rosie Odonnell after thanksgiving), check card and drivers license.

And now here is the cleaned up piles. Before throwing away receipts, always check then against your own records (story on THAT some other time). Now finally a layout of my most vital things back on the right.

You could definitely argue that I don’t need both credit cards, and you would probably be right but Ive had both forever. My most proud piece is the irony of my old chicago world beer tour card right next to my GNC card. Anyway, from a personal finance perspective, its a good idea to go through make sure your wallet is organized. If you have extra credit cards in there, REMOVE them because should one happen to fall out, you might not notice until someone has already charged up who knows how much. So, whats in YOUR wallet?