by William Bartholomew

Created on: January 26, 2007   Last Updated: March 29, 2009

First my disclaimer, I have no education in finances and my advice is meant to be used to help you tailor your own plan. That being said, my personal budgeting style has worked well for me and similar techniques have worked fairly well in my business also. So for what it's worth I'll offer my own spin on the world of personal finance.

This article is designed for those of you who don't want to spend the time to learn Quickbooks, don't feel like balancing a checkbook basically, have better things to do. I would suspect that some "financial" people will offer "better" ways of doing things and in the world of finance they will probably be correct. However, I live in a world where my bills are nothing more than a small part of my life and not a part that I particularly enjoy. One thing that is important to me is my time. More than anything I do not like to spend time juggling bills. My goal is to simply provide some food for thought that might save you some time and headaches.

First, if you don't have on-line banking then get it and look it over so you can begin to understand the basics of it. The commercials you see where someone logs in and in a few seconds has paid bills, yeah, that's how it is. I use Bank of America so other banks may offer different options then those I'm about to talk about. With on-line banking you can make payments with a few clicks. You can also set-up recurring payments (like maybe a car payment), get some of your bills sent right to your on-line banking area (I get State Farm & AmEx to name 2), plus you can easily make transfers to your other Bank accounts (this can also be set-up for transfers to account outside of your bank, like my INGDirect account). You can have your bills automatically paid once you receive an e-bill from one of your creditors. Be sure to check up on all your settings every so often to make sure everything is running as it should be. Bottom line, on-line banking saves you time and some clutter too.

Another thing I do is set up my budget weekly. It seems to me that a lot of people pay their bills once a month and often find that there's not quite enough money there. Most of us can count on a paycheck that falls within a similar dollar range each week. I take the low week (the average week could work too) and set up bills each week that I know can be covered by that pay. Along with the bills I also include grocery money & spending money. When I sit down to pay my bills I do not have to be concerned with "do

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