Budget, make, and save money, monitor bills accuracy, and pay on time

Money Budgeting and Bill Payment Management Feed-off of Each Other as a Good Habit

By Rom A. Day

Thursday, November 26th, 2009

Budgeting money presumes and requires you to have an income to meet budgeted dollar amounts. As you know, a budget would not be a budget without an income section and an expenses section. Without the income section it would be only a list of expenditures. However a budget alone does not do the job because with our busy lives and fast-paced way of life in the U.S.A. more often than not we might find strapped for time to do the little things that make it easy to implement a budget. For example, payment of our bills in a timely manner is more important than it may seem on the surface. On time bill payment that is not so painful as a result of the many details one has to keep track of to be able to do it, especially if you do use on-line payment of phone payment is great and it can save you time and money. You save money because in this way you are able to evade late fees and any other service that your creditor would not have billed you for normally had you paid your bills timely and had the funds to cover them. I speak from personal experience. I have made mistakes in that area. Such mistakes can often become so costly to you and profitable for the creditor that they are pleased to make you hard-up to meet all your financial needs. They become so pleased and mean with it that it back-fires on them often. As nice as they are when you make the payment of astronomical shark fees, the nice people are the ones that usually jack up the interest charged to you so high that it is as if they are in their old country and to make you even harder-up to make even their minimum payment let along to pay the balance in total.

In any event, I have been in the past hard-up to pay the bills, and I learned my lesson year 2000 to avoid getting to that point at all costs. As such over the many years from then and on I have fine-tuned my personal system; I tried quicken, excel, Word Perfect's Qualtro Pro and over time I identified my personal habit or steps that I needed to become better at in order to manage my money well and without the tedious long hours it used to take me. Then the convenience of on-line payment came on alone and it was often outweighed by the mundane details I needed to remember. For example passwords, user name, account number whenever I forgot the password; how about when the web site is down or the internet access got screwed up and thus I had to contact the creditor on the telephone and see if they would take the payment over the phone without the nuts fee that a few unscrupulous still do. Well you get the idea. I found myself swamped with the amount of detail; detailitis is neutral as a habit. However, it can make you or break you depending on the importance and impact of the detail. To make it less tiredsome, I drafted many forms over time; some worked a little bit; others did not; I fine tuned them as time went on. Nevertheless, sooner rather than later I found myself with the need to be able to have all at a glance for my personal life as well as a separate one for my work life as an employee. A key criteria is that I needed it to be flexible enough to make adjustments to it as needed without the necessity to redo the whole thing in as far as specific codes to particular accounts, web sites, emails, passwords, username, closing dates, arrival dates, due dates as they changed with the creditor billing system. My creativity juices were at its peak already, and I needed to come up with something to take care of this accounts management tool that was imperfect for my employer and for my self.

Well, I knew my daughter was very creative, a good steward of money and did use Microsoft word and other software applications already. I wanted it plain in MS word, not in MS Excel or any other sophisticated package. I made the decision to ask my daughter for her help with it for the Treasurer Office of R V A Associates,, Inc.... She agreed to it; we worked the details over the telephone, mail fax and email. And she did it. Now my life is easier to manage in this area thanks to her as she designed and used her young adult creativity to develop the form into a flexible and very professional form. She, Victoria Alva Diaz, solved a bill payment management tool need. This was a highly confidential project in the area of corporate treasury and which I adopted into my personal treasury. Now the form is shown on this page as part of the next article on this page. Please feel free to use the form and adopt it to suit you bills.

The article shown on this page, provides you with a form to help yourself to become more effective and efficient in this area. If you do manage your bill payment persistently and consistently and do have many payments to make due at different times of the month or year, it is done much more easily with a system that enables to look at all or at least most of the information pertinent to such payments at a glance. This form that my teenage daughter drew-up and perfected during a short internship over the summer for R V A ASSOCIATES, INC. does the job in a fabulous straight forward manner.

Personal Account Confidential Access Profiles Chart

By Rom Antony Day, and Victoria Alva Diaz

Monday, September 07, 2009

This form was designed and developed by Ms. Victoria Alva Diaz on a volunteer-basis for the office of the treasurer for a company I work for; I extend many thanks to Ms. Victoria Alva Diaz for this tremendous contribution which she completed before the target date. She used her creativity within parameter given to her; it is with her permission that I make this form public for others to manage bills more effectively and efficiently.

The objective of this form is to make it easier to keep track of important dates related to bills a company or individual is responsible for. For example, it allows you to have at a glance closing dates of bill, date the statement should have reached you, due date and time to make payments. All dates is data you may obtain from your prior statement or to make it more accurate from you creditors, bank and whoever else you buy services from or have financial responsibilities with. You can then add your information and add rows by pressing the tab key at the end of the last row of cells or from table drop down menu.

Furthermore, this chart permits you to have at a glance the names, contact information and on-line access to your credit account(s), bank account, expense account such as your utilities company and any other important account key information to contact them or look it up on-line all at a glance.

Well done Ms. Diaz; thanks for your professional, advanced, technical word assistance.

Personal Account Confidential Access Profiles Chart

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