How many times have you missed an important payment because you forgot when it was due? My guess is not that many times for most of you, but still a few folks this will trip up on dates and such (I do it for credit cards once every few years, and then have to phone up and plead to have interest rates reversed).
My wife is starting to learn some of the advantages of using some of the Electronic Calendars that are out there, in my case I use Google Calendar as the center of my scheduling world (it’s free, and Google backs it up for me), and then other clients connect to it (Outlook, iPhone Calendar, etc.,) to get information from it, so if it is not on my Google Calendar, it most likely won’t get noticed. One thing I did notice that Quicken had this “sync with Outlook” button, so I turned that on, so now Quicken adds events, to Outlook, which in turn (hopefully) adds them to Google Calendar, which means I shouldn’t miss too many more bills and such.
The danger with having too many things in your calendar is you may ignore some of them (calendar clutter), but I don’t schedule my day using this, so there are fewer things in my calendar. I know some folks who use their calendar to make rigid schedules, to force themselves to keep on track, I can’t do that, but I do need something to REMIND me when important things need to be done.
I did point out in if it’s not written down, that if you don’t keep records of what you have done financially how can you remember if you did it, and using an electronic calendar that way, also gives you a record of when you did stuff (passe compose), so keep that one in mind as well.
Many times I have forgotten when I visited with the bank or paid bills, but I can now check my electronic time ledger to see when things should have happened (it’s always good to update things to reflect you did it as well (i.e. if you have a Bill on your Calendar update it when you paid it with Credit Card bill *PAID* or something good like that)).
How do you keep track of your important dates and when things need to get paid? Do you simply automate those payments?
Like you, I use Google calendar to remind me of bills that are due. Since I’m presently laid off and worried there might not be the funds there, lest I am short that month, I schedule the payment date several days before the bill is actually due and pay it then. I do have a few bills regularly scheduled on my credit card but guess I’m not quite as comfortable having it automatically taken from my bank account…..I’ve had that abused before and it’s not fun trying to straighten it out!