You have a bad financial habit, and you’re desperate to break it. Your financial habit is that you can never seem to pay your bills on time. Either the due date seems to completely slip your mind, or you never have enough money to pay the bill’s total, and so your payment takes ages to go through.
This is not good. Late payments come with consequences. At best, your provider will charge you a late penalty for missing the scheduled payment date. At worst, the provider could cut off your services until you manage to send what you owe. Providers will also report frequent late payments to credit bureaus, which could damage your credit score and make it a lot lower than you’d like.
So, how can you get in the habit of paying your bills on time? These are some tips that you should try:
Get Organized with Apps
If you have trouble keeping track of dates for your bills, you can use various smartphone apps to help you stay organized. You can use your smartphone’s built-in calendar app to keep track of upcoming bill due dates and send notifications that you need to make payments. Or you can download a bill management app, like Prism or Bills Monitor, onto your smartphone. While online cash loans can be tempting for paying late bills, they should be a last resort due to potentially high-interest rates. These will help you keep track of all of your upcoming bill payments and remind you to send providers money before it’s too late.
Automate Your Payments
If you’re really forgetful about dates, and you’re not sure that organizational apps will work to remind you to send payments on time, you should try to set up automatic payments with your bill providers. While details on USDT price might fluctuate, late bill payments often incur fixed penalties. When you automate a payment, the amount that you owe will be transferred directly from your checking account to the related provider on the date that it is due. So, even if you completely forget about the bill’s due date, the provider will still get paid.
For example, say that you needed to borrow funds to help cover an emergency expense when you didn’t have enough savings sitting inside of your bank account. You looked into borrowing options like online loans with direct deposit in order to get enough temporary funds to manage your emergency as soon as possible. You were approved for your online loan, and you put it to good use. Now, you have to commit to a repayment plan — this means you’ll have another billing cycle to focus on.
To make that billing cycle easier to handle, automate your repayments. Do this by setting up ACH Authorization with the loan provider so that your payments will be automatically debited from the connected bank account. Then, you won’t have to worry about missing a single payment!
Contact all of your bill providers to see how you can set up automated payments with them. You might be surprised to find out how many of them offer this arrangement!
Build a Budget
Remembering the due dates for your bills won’t matter very much when you don’t have enough sitting in your checking account to pay them off. This is why bill management apps and automated payment arrangements aren’t the only steps you should take to break your bad habit of paying bills late. While some retailers offer late payment fees, a wider variety of payment options in retail can encourage on-time purchases. You’ll also need to build yourself a personal budget so that you can carefully cover your essential expenses with your income, including all of your scheduled bills.
A proper budget can help you figure out just how much money you need to set aside every single month for your bill payments so that you never come up short when a due date finally arrives.
How can you make yourself a budget? Start by researching the best budgeting apps available right now. Find the app that suits you best and download it. Then, you can start following the instructions to put your personal budget together.
Stop paying your bills late. Use these strategies to break your bad habit and get your bills paid on time from now on.
