We LOVE sitting down each month to do our budget meeting because it gives us a chance to review how responsible we were (or weren’t). You know what we DON’T love: sitting down multiple times a month to pay our bills. Ugh.

Recently, we’ve been tossing around the idea of automating our finances. Why? Because we’re TIRED of looking at this crap every month. Not only do we have to remember when to pay our bills, but we also have to remember how to get into the websites each month. We just feel like the time we spend paying bills could be better utilized.

So.

How the hell are we going to make this happen?

1: Enable auto-pay for all bills

To kick things off, we’re going to log into all of our sites and enable auto-pay for our bills. This way, all of our payments will be automatically withdrawn from the joint account that we use for our monthly budget.

Alternatively, we could also set up ‘Bill Pay’ from our bank’s website. This is an option if you don’t want to trust other people with your account info.

But in order for auto-pay to work, there needs to actually be money IN THE ACCOUNT…

2: Transfer enough money to be one month ahead

Dannie and I have separate bank accounts but we also have a joint bank account that we transfer our budget funds into twice a month. We will leave enough money in our account each month to create a buffer that would cover an extra month of expenses.

This is to ensure that there is actually enough money in the account at all times to cover every single payment. If we only put just enough money in, we would risk an overdraft if our electric bill is $10 more than it was the previous month.

Dannie would probably kill seriously injure somebody if that happened.

3: Readjust the budget at the end of the month

Even though we are automating our finances, we will still continue to have our monthly budget meetings so that we can review what came out of our account. If any of the bill amounts change due to usage, we’ll adjust the budget for the following month. If a bill was suspiciously high/abnormal, we’ll investigate further and most likely fuss at someone. We already do this now, so it’s not much of a change but it definitely helps us continue to have accurate numbers.

There is nothing more frustrating than sitting down for the budget meeting and not being able to figure out why our spreadsheet says we should have $$$$ but we only have $$ left.

If you have a problem figuring out where your money is going each month, make sure that you grab our FREE budget/debt tracker. I promise it will change your life for the better!

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So, that’s the plan. We’re automating our finances and hoping for the best. Fingers crossed that we don’t crash and burn!

Do any of you guys currently do this with your own finances? How has it worked out for you?

— Dj & Dannie