Adulting Level 2: Yard work, bills and babies

Good Evening Blog readers!  Its Monday, I'm waiting for my soup to finish cooking on this slightly dreary weather Spring day.  Yesterday was amazing weather, but didn't stick.  It was good it was so nice out though, because our lawn was looking atrocious and my husband and I FINALLY bought a lawn mower.  I wish I could have been the one using the nice new outdoor toy but alas I was stuck with just using my nifty orange weed whacker BECAUSE.... we are having A BABY.

Check out my little cutie who's ultrasounds look like most other baby ultrasounds!!

Besides the fact that we are having a boy... my husband keeps informing me that I was warned about the possibility of a big baby, and low and behold, he was 1.5 pounds at his last ultrasound.  The tech put him in the 65th percentile for other babies that are 24 weeks... Tomorrow he will be 25 weeks, but still, lol.

Due to our little bundle of joy coming late this summer (hopefully not sooner...), hubs and me have been working diligently to get the house ready through cleaning constantly, organizing different parts of the house and getting our bills in order so that if I end up in the hospital on bed rest, or possibly can't manage our finances for whatever reason (be it baby exhaustion, or just plain laziness...) hubs can manage everything.  Currently I handle making sure all of our bills get paid on time, and am thankful for automatic bill pay.  Most of our bills are automatic bill pay just so I don't have to worry about it.  The downside is, then you forget the password and username for things, and you need the account number, your Social Security number, the promise to give them your first born just to get that damn password reset...  SO!  Hubs and I came up with a system so that if anything ever happened to either of us, we can easily make sure our bills are still being paid and we have the account number for each one.


Ready for this posts project? 

You will need the following:
1. A printer
2. A binder
3. 1 or 2 packs of page dividers
4. Any bills that are already printed.  

**I used a pack of dividers that were pocket dividers to hold stuff related to that bill in it.**

1. Figure out how many bills you have, and how many dividers you may need.  I labeled ours in general sections such as "Utilities" and "car".  We currently only have 1 car payment, but eventually will have 2, just like our Utilities are our water, oil and electric are currently 3 separate bills.
2. Label each divider how you see fit.  As i've already said, I did ours as general things specifically because I was too cheap to buy 2 packs of dividers, BUT some people need more dividers than we did.
3. Sort those bills!! If you don't have paper copies of all of your bills, this is where your printer comes into play.  Go online and print your bills.  Even if you are signed up for paperless billing, whoever you own money to, or holds your money should have a statement online that you can easily print out.  Now, give each set of bills there own little section so that you can easily be reminded of when things are due.  I went so far as to create a little calendar chart so I know when everything is due and don't miss one.  (I know I'm slightly obsessed... its okay)

Now you have a copy of all of your bills in one place.  Now if you are like some other people I know that are lucky enough to have a filing cabinet to put there bills in, AWESOME, you can put away as many paper bills as you need and be super organized.  But I suggest having this binder as well anyway, because then you don't have to go find the most recent bill just to get 1 account number.

I know this posts project wasn't a very typical craft project, but hey, still took some time to do.  I suggest getting brightly colored binder dividers and a fun binder, because fun binders just make bill paying more fun, as opposed to now where you simply watch your money fly out the window...

Happy Crafting readers!!

taxikab