Fuzzy’s Financial Blog

If you have a job that pays you biweekly it can be interesting paying bills. If you have bad habits like I used to have where one paycheck I would pay certain bills and the next paycheck I would pay the others and then forget which ones you paid the week previously there are things you can do to correct it. Using my banks free bill paying service I setup all of my bills in it, at first I tried to create how I had been doing it manually before hand and then I realised I was paying more out one payday then the other payday. Which may not seem bad but I would spend the extra money before the next payday when I would need it.

Now what I do is pay half of each bill each payday. This doesn’t sound like it would do much but it does help even out the expenditures and then I know for sure what is left in the account is excess to be used for things as groceries and gas. One thing you will want to make sure of is that you are paying the proper amounts. You will also get about an extra months payment made each year since 26 paydays equate into 13 paired payments.

It is nice knowing I have each of my bills paid biweekly, I do suggest rechecking the amount owed at least quarterly, especially for those bills that are based on usage. When I set up all of mine I rounded up to the next dollar, and on some I actually set it to $5 over each pay period, which is great for making sure the bills is paid but also leads to having money basically sitting at the payees bank accounts and not yours. I recently went through and checked to make sure I had everything current and found on some accounts I had a full months payment and then some as credit, and on another they sent me a letter to stop sending in payments and that they would tell me when to start sending payments again since I wound up paying a years worth of service in credit how did that happen you may wonder is well it was a bill I got bimonthly and I had accidentally set it up to pay the full amount biweekly.

If you have debt that you are paying off and it is et to a yearly schedule this will get you and extra months payment made each year, and with the changes in laws that have come out relatively recentlyfor most debt types this means an extra months payment torwards the principal directly instead of interest like companies used to do if you didn’t designate. 

One nice thing about this is after it has been established for awhile and if you have credits, not necessarily a good thing, and you need some extra money one pay period you could set the bank to skip a payment to those payess that you have at least one pay period amount of credit ahead and use that extra money for what you need.