How To Keep Track of Your Bills

Since the 1950s a typical American household has seen the number of bills that they receive every month go up by two bills every decade. A recent telecom survey stated that the average household now gets about 11 bills month. These bills include basic utilities, internet, cable services, and loan payments. Keeping track of all of these bills can be overwhelming for some families.

Consider that in the 1950s, most families received about four bills a month. These covered electricity, water and sewer service, telephone service, and a mortgage. There were no credit cards (store credit was usually paid at the store and invoices were rarely mailed out), car loans were rare, and internet and cell phones hadn’t been invented yet.

Today, a household can receive dozens of bills a month. This is especially the case for households with multiple adult members. Instead of two or three utility bills, a household today will get a bill for electricity, water, trash service, sewer service, a landline phone, a cell phone, cable, and internet. Instead of a single mortgage bill, a lot of households have multiple mortgage bills, credit card bills, car loans, and personal loans. Households also contract out more services such as housecleaning, yard work, and child care.

Having so many more bills to keep track of means that many households forget to make all of their payments on time. For many people, this means incurring hefty late fees from companies that penalize their customers for paying their bills a few days late.

Fortunately, one solution to this is to combine your bills into one payment. Some companies have already introduced options that allow customers to consolidate bills into one payment. For example, many cable companies allow a person to combine their cable bill with their landline telephone, wireless telephone, and internet service. While this is a good start towards reducing paperwork clutter, it does not reduce the amount of bills that are connected to loans.

Between student loans, credit cards, mortgages, and auto loans, the typical American family will probably have at least half the bills coming into their house as loan payments. Since loan payments often have the highest penalty rates and late fees, missing a loan payment can seriously impact a family’s budget. Consolidating loan payments, however, can save a family both time and money.

Combining credit cards together as one big loan with one interest rate will eliminate the multiple bills arriving throughout the month (each with a different due date, of course). By combining all of the credit card bills into one loan, however, a family will receive a single bill with a single interest rate and payment every month.

Some families choose to go even further and combine all of their debt payments into one bill. There are plenty of loans available that will combine mortgage payments, car loans, and credit cards. For some families, this will reduce the dozens of bills they receive each month (each with different terms of payment) into one easy to manage expense.



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