How I automate my bill payments and keep track

Someone was mentioning about how they saw a few hundred dollars in their account and couldn’t figure out what it was there for – a bill? a deposit for something else? What is this for?

I have EXACTLY THE SAME ISSUE.

I know right — “Stop it with your dumb First World Problems, you have too much money… bla bla bla. get out of here with your free cash”

But really though, even if you don’t have “too much money”, keeping track of your money between so many accounts can be difficult if you are paying bills in general and want to maximize all of your money to earn as much interest as possible.

I have caught cheques I SHOULD have written with this system and forgot about, or bills I had to pay and forgot about, and literally had to drive to the bank that day, withdraw cash and pay it in person to avoid an interest charge.

This is my system of how I do it.

I use an app called Things and I made a category called MONEY

This is what it looks like: Things that have to get done, things that are in progress, and so on.

In there, whenever I pay a bill payment, I make a note exactly like this:

Then for the bill payment, as I transferred the money March 2nd, but paid it March 3rd, I set the due date to March 2nd to check to make sure the transfer went through okay, and then move the task to May 3rd to see that it cleared out of the account.

I always put the Due Date as well, just in case I screw up the transfer and automated bill payment and have to know exactly how much time I have to pay the bill via another transfer/payment again, or go to the bank and pay it in cash.

I also have other money tasks like transfers of money from one account to another:

I keep this task open until it is cleared. When I do the action of transferring the money, I make the note, and set it for 2-3 business days after the date I do the transfer because that’s how long it takes to move the money.

Then on that day, I see the note, I log in, check to see if it moved.

If it didn’t move, I move the task to the next day.

If it moved, I take action on the money right away as I had planned, and then check the item off as “Done”.

At any given moment, I can check this category and see all the transfers of money from all my various accounts, upcoming bill payments, daycare cheques I have written, money I have to transfer for the cheques I have to write like tax payments, license payments, and have not yet done so for both my personal and business.

This category runs my money life.

When I see money in an account, I know why it is there because I always keep a $0 balance in my chequing account, and everything is fully utilized either in investments or in a high interest savings account.