The other night, I got an e-mail from a friend who’s kicking herself for letting her car registration expire. Her car got towed and impounded, and was damaged in the process. She has now spent nearly $1000 dollars dealing with all the problems. (My first reaction was that the damage to the car was fairly excessive, but she’s pretty much out of luck since it was her fault in the first place by letting her registration expire. D.C.’s great like that.) She freely admits that she was in the wrong here and should have paid more attention to when her registration expired.
What likely happened was that she was expecting to get a bill in the mail and nothing ever appeared. I know that in previous years, I didn’t even think about my car registration until the bill appeared. Then I knew it was time to take care of it. This year, I’m prepared and expecting the bill soon, as my registration expires in September. If I don’t see something by mid-August, I will be making some phone calls.
My friend could have avoided her problem by simply writing the date in a planner and making a note to check the status of her registration about a month or so before the expiration. There are many options for planners – you can go the paper route, you can have a handheld device, you can have a calendar on your computer, or one online. There are probably others options as well. I’ve tried them all and always come back to the paper method, but that’s just me. A lot of the online calendar services will send you reminders by text or e-mail, which is great for people who forget to check their planners.
A lot of people just pay their bills when prompted. I get an e-mail when my cell phone bill is due. Other bills arrive in the mail. For the most part, I know when these are coming, so I recognize when they’re late, but if my life suddenly got busy, it would be very easy to not realize that my credit card bill never appeared and needs to be paid immediately. And missing a bill just leads to added expenses – late fees or worse – service shutoff. Or damage to your car from a negligent towing company.
So save yourself those added expenses. Get a planner. Make a spreadsheet. Check out the calendar option on your computer. Check out an online service like Google Calendar or Remember The Milk. Don’t let yourself forget a bill and then regret it later.
Megan is a 30-something government employee in the Washington, DC area. She got interested in Personal Finance when she got out of college and realized that her paycheck wasn’t going to go as far as she had hoped. Since starting this blog, she has managed to buy a house and make a solid start on her retirement goals, and hopes to help others do the same. Here is her story:
In 2007, I was a gainfully employed 20-something with no debt but not a lot of knowledge about personal finance. It was a co-worker’s comment about Roth IRAs that sent me to the internet, searching for information. It was then that I realized that I really didn’t know a whole lot about personal finance and that my current financial situation was due a lot to inherent frugal tendencies, generous family members, a fear of debt, and good luck. While that was working for me, clearly I needed a better plan.
While I had no debt, I was also pretty much living paycheck to paycheck and not worrying about going over budget (I say this as if I had a real budget) because I had an emergency fund set aside to cover any overages.
Except that’s not what an emergency fund is for.
So I did a lot of research, read a lot of blogs, and decided that I needed a plan. I needed to budget. I needed to know what I was spending my money on. I needed to prepare for the future.
I decided to create a blog not only to make myself accountable to others but also to share the knowledge that I gained along the way. I’ve learned so much from my fellow bloggers, and I hope that my readers can find something useful in what I have to share as well.
I did the same thing, though with less drastic results, a few months ago. I know that my registration is due on Valentine’s Day every year, but for the first time ever, I completely forgot about it. Not only did I have to pay the late fee, the registration took so long to arrive that I got a ticket when parked on city streets. Ugh. Something like $127 in stupid fees.
I keep track of these things using my budget. If it’s the end of the month and I haven’t paid my phone bill, I know because my budget says I still have money for that. If my registration is due, I know it because I budgeted some money for it. I also budget money in certain months for birthdays and anniversaries which helps me remember them.