When Automation Isn’t An Option
A while back, I wrote a guest post for Radical Fire about living on an irregular income. Primarily the fact that, due to living on an irregular income, automating finances is difficult. How can you schedule for things to be deducted from your account when you don’t always know when you are getting paid? In it, I mentioned paying your bills early. Going to go into slightly more detail on that now.
When I say pay your bills early, I am meaning pre-paying or overpaying them. For instance, if your water bill is $70 a month (just random numbers), then $210 would pay for the quarter, $420 would pay for six months, and $840 would pay for the year.
I try to pre-pay as far out as I can, assuming I still plan to have the bill. For instance, the mortgage, internet, water, electricity, and trash are all paid through the end of 2021 currently. We pre-paid those to that point back in May 2021. That way when I only had two paychecks from the start of June to the end of August, we were covered.
Now, I know this isn’t something that works for everyone, but it has definitely helped me out a lot, especially as my paychecks keep getting pushed out due to supply chain issues. 🙃 Life be crazy nowadays.
How about you? What do you do if automating finances isn’t an option?
Feature Photo by Arno Smit on Unsplash
I haven’t had to deal with irregular income, per se, but when I worked for the state government, we got paid once a month. That led me to feeling rich after payday and broke for about half of the month.
I got in the habit of paying my mortgage 2-3 weeks early, so I didn’t have to scramble to pay it within a day or so of those paydays.
I also like to pay large amounts to recurring bills like electric/water bills – especially when I trying to meet a minimum spending requirement for a new credit card sign-up bonus. I’m eventually going to have to pay that March 2022 electric bill anyway, so I might as well get some free travel out of it 🙂
I totally get that. We get paid twice a month, but only if there is something to pay us. Right now, I will be waiting until the end of November (🤞🏾) for my next paycheck. 🙃
Thanks for reading!
Waaait, why are the supply chain problems affecting your paychecks? That’s so annoying! I hoard money for the lean times, instead, since I don’t trust utilities and the like to bill me correctly if I prepay. And if they bill incorrectly, they have very little incentive to fix it when they already have my money!
I’m a suspicious sort 😉
I work in new construction and there are limited materials so construction is taking longer. So, homes that were planned to close in November are closing in December and January. I don’t get paid until closing, so I wait. 🤷🏾♀️
So far the utilities here have been good with the pre-paying. I do check in on it to make sure everything is looking okay. My trash bill went up a few bucks, but that was expected. It’s paid to the end of 2022 now. lol
Thanks for reading!