In response to Aaron Brandon’s weekend task, I set about to automate my billpaying. I was largley successful.
I was able to automate all but three of my regular bills. With the exception of those three, I’ll never have to spend a single second paying bills again.
How did I improve the remaining three?
The last ones were bills that I would take the time to write out a check or go buy a money order for. I’d then fill out the pay stub, rummage around for the correct postage and affix a return label. Next I’d drive to the post office to mail them personally as I wanted to be 100% sure the task was completed.
I rarely paid them all at the same time and would usually make two trips a month to mail the three.
Well, I took the time to set up accounts and fill in my banking info on the Web-sites of these three bills so that I could pay them in seconds using the Web. I then bookmarked the log-in pages and put them in their own bookmark folder.
Now to test things out…
I open the three Web pages and one at a time, I log in and pay all three bills. I punched my Polder digital timer when I started and again when all three had been paid. Total time: 2 minutes 32 seconds.
I estimate that the old way of doing this took 90 minutes/month.
Here’s what I’ve gained by investing a little time today.
I have freed up almost an hour and a half per month. Also, I would periodically think about those bills all month reminding myself to pay them. I have set up a series of e-mail and physical reminders that allow me to never think about them and know that I won’t forget to pay them… ever.
I’ve removed that negative “bill” thinking so I can now replace it with “income” thinking instead. That’s the reall gain here.
So did I fully automate my bills? No, they’re about 97% automated based on time. However, I can and will fully automate these last three bills in the coming months as I figure out how to do that.
Go look at Aaaron’s task challenge, pick one and get it done today: http://www.aaronbrandon.com/?p=43
Richard Lee
March 26, 2007 at 11:42 pm
[...] Richard Lee over at 365 day to freedom did. He decided to automate his bill paying. That’s a great process to automate. Why? Because when you receive all of your bills in the mail, you have to spend the time to look over each one which can cause stress and will waste time/life. What starts happening when you start using your banks billpay feature? In the mail, you’ll start noticing only checks and other sources of income arriving. It’s just that simple. Richard will be greatly rewarded for what he has done for himself. But what did you do? Or, what will you do? [...]