Bill, Bill, and more Bills

I'm sitting at the bar in my kitchen as I've just finished paying my bills for the the next two weeks. Why the next two weeks? Thats a great question. I get payed every two weeks. Tomorrow is pay day.

I always sit down the night before I get paid and "spend" every dollar of my paycheck on paper. Some pays it goes better than others if you know what I mean. But hey, that's life.

I use an excel spreadsheet to do the number crunching. This makes it easier to go back and revise my allocations as i work through the bills. Believe it or not, I enjoy this process. Once your entire paycheck is spent on paper, it takes away managing your finances by crisis or impulse.

Here's a snapshot of the spreadsheet that I use.

1. I enter in my net pay and my wife's net pay along with any check book balance carryover and any miscellaneous deposits. This adds up to what is available to spend in the next two weeks.

2. Next, we start "spending" the money by entering amounts in column C. As I do this, the remaining dollars available to spend in column D get smaller and smaller. When I get to the bottom of the sheet, column D must equal zero.

3. As I spend money throughout this pay period, I enter these amounts in columns E - H and column I shows me how much I have left to spend in each category.

How about you? What method do you use to pay your bills?