There are several strategies you can use, to ensure that you pay your phone bills on time. You can opt to set up an automatic bill payment arrangement, for the phone bills. Or you can opt to create reminders for yourself, with regard to the bill payments. You can go a step further, and ensure that you budget for the phone bills well in advance. We will now proceed to look at what each of those strategies entails:
Setting up automatic bill payment arrangements
So this is where you instruct your bank to be making the bill payments, on your behalf, using the money in your account, after a certain interval (without fail). This system can work very well if, for instance, you have subscribed for a phone plan where you pay a fixed amount of money monthly. Then you would be assured that every month, on a certain date, your phone bills would be automatically paid – as long as you have enough money in your account. And if, at some point, you don’t have enough money in your account to pay the bill on the stated date, the bank can send you alerts to that effect (well in advance). Then you can proceed to replenish your account, to ensure that there is enough money to pay the bills on the due date. Or you can make other arrangements for the phone bill payments: whatever it takes to ensure that the bill payment isn’t delayed.
There is also the arrangement where you can give your phone carrier your credit card/debit card number. The idea would be to bill that credit card/debit card on monthly cycles. So when payment date for the phone bills comes, funds would be deducted from the credit card/debit card automatically – and used to pay the phone bills. And this means that you would have peace of mind in knowing that your phone bills are automatically catered for, as long as you have some funds in the debit card/credit card used for the purpose.
Creating reminders for the phone bills
So this is where you start by figuring out what the best date for you to be paying the phone bills is. Then you create reminders for yourself (on your calendar, or using a ‘post it’), to the effect that on such and such a date, you would need to make phone bill payments. Nowadays, we have all sorts of personal scheduling apps for mobile devices that you can use for this purpose. The most important thing here is to have something to remind you as the date when you are supposed to make the phone bill payments approaches. That is better than having a system that only reminds you that you need to make the phone bill payments on the very date when the bills are due! Remember, to pay the phone bills, you will need to have both time and money. So you need to have something to remind you that you need to pay your phone bill on such and such a date (well in advance). This would then give you the opportunity to set aside time for the task, and to organize your finances in order to be able to honor the payment… With these sorts of reminders, it is very unlikely that you would end up delaying in making the phone bill payments.
Of course, if you opt to use this strategy, you need to get yourself to respect the ‘reminders’ unfailingly. There are people who have systems to remind them that on such and such dates, they are supposed to perform such and such tasks. Yet, even when they are reminded, they fail to honor the reminders – making the whole system pointless. So the key thing here is to avoid procrastination. If your ‘reminders’ tell you that you are supposed to pay your phone bill on such and such a date, you need to go ahead and actually make the payment. Even if it is the not the last possible date to pay the phone bills, you still need to make the payment. Otherwise you will keep procrastinating, and you will soon find yourself facing a deadline: in terms of the last possible date on which you can pay the phone bill. Then if you procrastinate further, you will already be deemed to have delayed your payment. That would possibly lead to a situation where your phone line would be disconnected. And the phone service provider may even report you to a credit bureau, thus messing up your credit score.
Budgeting for the phone bills well in advance
There is one key reason as to why people fail to pay their phone bills on time. It is usually not that they are unable to remember to make the payments. Neither is it usually due to lack of time to make the payments (after all, these payments take very little time nowadays). Rather, in most cases, you tend to find that the reason as to why people are unable to make their phone bill payments on time is due to lack of money. So you find that the date when you are supposed to make the phone bill payments arrives, and you suddenly realize that you don’t have the money to make the payment! The way to avoid finding yourself in this situation is by budgeting for the phone bills well in advance. This way, you’d always be having the money to pay the phone bills, when they fall due.
It is a good idea to allocate the money for the phone bill payments from the previous months’ earnings. Thus, for instance, you can have July phone bill payments budgeted for from June earnings. This way, even if there is a delay in processing your paycheck, you would still be able to make the phone bill payment on time.
This idea of budgeting for phone bill payments well in advance is not hard to implement – keeping in mind the fact that personal phone bills tend to be rather modest. There is usually no reason as to why you can’t set aside a few bucks (sometimes as little as $30 or $50) from this month’s paycheck, to cater for next month’s phone bill. With that sort of arrangement, you will be well assured that a situation would never arise where you would be unable to find money to pay the phone bill.
Leave a Reply