Have you ever paid a bill late and been hit with a penalty fee? It hurts doesn't it? It's not always an issue of being unable to pay on time either. Often it's just that a busy lifestyle makes it hard to keep track of when bills are due so we make sure we pay them before their due date.

Credit cards are the worst offenders, with $35 to $45 hits if you don't pay by the due date. Bounced checks are another, if you have insufficient funds in your account when the check is presented. Some banks can charge $50.00 for this. Utility bills are usually lower, some use a percentage fee and some actually don't charge a fee at all but even so, it's not good for the credit rating to pay late too often.

So How Can You  Stay on Top of the Situation?

I discovered this solution when I searched for a blank schedule. I came across blank schedule templates and one of these has a calendar in it where you can go through your monthly bills and enter your invoice payment or your credit card minimum amounts onto a financial schedule over a year.

This helped me to cluster bills by the week, so each week I'd check the schedule and see for example in the first week of the month there should be a bill for credit card 1, the electricity bill and the mobile phone. I can then sort out these bills and pay and file them and know I don't have to look again till week 3 when credit card 2 is due and every third month rates, gas and the landline and broadband accounts are due.

I actually have a larger range than this with business bills to keep track of but you get the picture. Being able to see what to expect on one page makes it so much easier to stay on top of it all. In fact since I set this up, I haven't forgotten or been late with a single bill payment.

The actual dates and format are all created in the spreadsheet template and you'll need a spreadsheet program like Excel or Calc from Open Office (free) to use this or any of the other schedules.

There are 4 fields on this Pay Bills schedule: One to enter an amount, then in the next the word "due" which you change to "paid" when you have done so, and I use the other two for the "company" and "what for" such as phone bill, but you could use one to enter receipt numbers if you wanted to, to keep a record of them.

Bonus of Motivation Books

I got the schedule from the package on the following site and also got a stack of motivational books as a bonus, the quality of which is very good.

http://www.blankschedulexls.com

Anyway, thought I'd pass that on to anyone suffering from late fees due to disorganization.The last thing anyone needs when money is hard to come by is penalty fees from banks or any other institutions, the bills are hard enough to pay as it is!

To-Do Workbook and Schedule Templates

I am still creating other schedules and feeling my way through the schedule system with mixed success. I like the to-do Workbook in the pack and I have duplicated this for several projects now. There is more powerful software you can get when projects need detailed records but this is a very simple solution that's easy to use to get things started with.

I think the to-do workbook and blank schedules could be very useful for personal goal setting, for prioritizing the steps towards a goal and sorting them into stages in the to-do workbook. Then once the steps are sorted out, you can enter them easily onto the daily schedules and monthly schedules you've picked for the workbook.

The templates paste easily into the workbook and print well, and the few issues I had were covered in the Excel cheat sheets. The templates are very simple but I like that, I don't need anything fancy and the range is adequate.

The only downside maybe that there is not any specific roster schedules that I could see and because none of the schedules are defined for a particular use, people looking for a specific homework or school schedule will need to think creatively to decide which schedule will suit them best. I hope that will be addressed and the updates will be made available for free as it says.