I get all of my bills online, and have this really obsessive and probably primitive system of reminding myself when the bills are due. When I get an e-bill, I forward it back to myself (just go with me here, yes I know I’m weird but it works for me!) and change the subject line to read, for example, “DUE 6/1.” Then I use Gmail’s lovely labeling feature to mark it in bold red, “Bills.” That way, since I’m constantly in my email, it’ll pop out at me and I’ll be able to glance at my messages on payday and see which bills need to be paid right away.

I’m sure there is some other organizational tool that I could and probably should use, but this is the system I’ve been using and it works. I started doing this when I accidentally *deleted* an e-bill that happened to be a credit card statement. uh…oops? I was promptly charged a late fee when the minimum payment never arrived, because you know, those credit card companies are VULTURES and should all be destroyed. (I later begged for them to take the late fee off and they did, and then I paid off the darn card so hahaha.)

Earlier, I was sending myself a reminder of one of my bill due dates and instead of marking it “DUE 6/1,” I marked it “DUE 7/1″ because for some reason I thought it was almost July, not June coming up. Because really, I have soooo much time and just want to speed it up even more!! Not so much. I firmly believe that the older we get, the faster time goes by. I’m sure this is impossible but I believe it anyway!

(btw, I caught my mistake and fixed it to say 6/1. We wouldn’t want another repeat of the cryfest that was the late payment fee incident.)