Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Juggling financial tasks of all denominations

Keeping up with finances is important—and sometimes urgent too. Juggling everything can seem like its own job.

This week’s tip comes from alan.porter, who shows how to keep up with the day-to-day, month-to-month, and periodic things to keep your finances humming along.

I use RTM for lots of things: personal items, yearly goals, lists of books to read and movies to watch. But my biggest motivation for using RTM is for staying on top of bills. It easily handles the various schedules on which recurring bills come due.

So I have a list called “bills”, which my wife and I share. It contains monthly bills like credit cards, annual bills like property tax and insurance, and also some reminders to do some financial hygiene like balancing checkbooks and downloading statements.

To separate the different kind of financial tasks, I created three tags (with different colors): pay.manual, pay.auto and pay.none.

Pay.manual is for bills that we have to pay ourselves (not auto-drafted). It requires manual action from us to initiate it.

Pay.auto is for bills that are auto-drafted from our bank, so we don’t actually need to DO anything, except maybe check on it later.

Pay.none is for tasks like balancing the checkbook or downloading statements, which need to be done from time to time, but that can slide a few days without penalty.

With these tags, my wife and I can tell at a glance whether the time-critical stuff needs immediate attention. And when we get a rainy Sunday, we can take care of all of those other cleanup items.

Thanks for sharing this tip, alan.porter! You’re our Tips & Tricks Tuesday winner this week.

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