How to Get the Bills Paid

There are many ways to get the bills paid today. Each has pros and cons and realistically most people use some combination of all of them. The answer to the question of which method is the best will change from person to person and from one stage of life to another.


1. For the elderly, putting the routine bills on auto-pay may be practical. If forgetfulness is becoming an issue or if writing out the check is becoming more difficult, auto-pay ensures that bills will get paid in a timely way. Implementing auto-pay requires you to provide the company with your bank’s routing number and your account number.

2. For the person that has made accumulating points, cash back rewards and frequent flier miles a passion, putting everything possible on a credit card is the way to go.

3. For the person that is pressed for time but doesn’t want to build-up credit card balances, online bill pay through a bank is the answer. Once the set-up is complete, multiple bills can be paid in a matter of minutes. Before you sit at the computer, gather statements from all the payees you want to set-up. You’ll need account numbers, mailing addresses, and phone numbers for each.

4. For those that don’t trust the computer, writing out checks is the method of choice (and don’t even bother trying to convince them otherwise). Now that banks are no longer returning cancelled checks, this method loses one record keeping advantage.

5. For those that can no longer handle the bill-paying task at all, there is a Daily Money Manager. A Daily Money Manager is a person that comes to your home on a regular basis and helps with the mail, the bills, making deposits, balancing checking accounts, and more. It is a way to provide the support needed to keep living independently. The American Association of Daily Money Managers provides a tool on their website for a geographical search to find a Daily Money Manager in your area.

Bill Paying

Someone should have signatory authority on your checking account. This is especially important if you are single, widowed, or divorced. What would happen if you were suddenly incapacitated for a period of time? Who is going to keep your financial life current? You don’t want to come home from a period in a rehab facility and find letters threatening to turn off your electricity.

If you don’t realize how important this is, here are two similar scenarios with two different endings:

Both Anne and Shirley were recently widowed. Shirley had her attorney change her Power of Attorney from her husband to her daughter and had been to the bank to add her daughter’s name to her checking account. Anne, on the other hand, was having a difficult time coping and hadn’t done anything. Unfortunately, both of them took major falls and had serious medical problems. Shirley’s daughter was able to step right in and take over her mother’s finances. Anne’s children were attentive and wanted to help but their hands were tied. While an attorney dealt with the process to correct the situation, they were trying to pay their mother’s bills out of their own accounts but that was causing them quite a hardship.

Some things to consider when deciding to whom you give signatory authority:

1. The person you decide to give signatory authority to should, obviously, be someone you trust. But, it also should be someone who will follow your directions. The idea is that they will pay your bills on time, not that they would make any significant changes to your life.

2. Does this person pay their own bills on time? Your scatter-brained best friend may have the best of intentions but may not be right for this particular task.

3. Pick someone who lives near you. Your son/daughter that lives 1500 miles away may fly in for a short period of time until the emergency is over but that won’t help if you’re laid up any length of time.

4. Pick someone who is discreet. If they are going to sort your mail and pay your bills, you don’t want it to be someone who’s going to tell the neighborhood about your American Express charges or the type of catalogs you get in the mail.

Lastly, take into account how much exposure you’re comfortable with. Think carefully about the flow of your money in a typical month. If you have large sums of money being electronically deposited to your checking account, you may want to open a separate account for household bills with a certain dollar amount automatically transferred into this account. You would then give someone signatory authority to this household account only thus limiting the amount of money they have access to each month.

It All Starts with the Mail

To some of you, dealing with the mail each day is routine, something you don’t give much thought to.

For others, the mail is an overwhelming task that leaves you exasperated on a daily basis. There can be varying reasons for this – the beginnings of Alzheimer’s, multiple people getting the mail and leaving it everywhere, or simple disorganization. When mail gets ‘misplaced’ throughout the house life gets much more stressful and complicated than need be. Bills don’t get paid and extraordinary amounts of time get spent searching for things, never mind the mess.

I have been in people’s homes and in the hunt for the mail and bills, found them in kitchen drawers, on kitchen counters, in the car, in bedroom night tables, in between cushions on the couch, and so on. Sometimes it has been opened, sometimes it hasn’t. The consequences of lost/misplaced mail can be serious. For example, checks may become invalid after a certain number of days, insurance policies lapse if not paid within a certain time frame, and interest charges on credit cards mount up.

Regardless of the reason that the issue exists, the important thing to do is to establish a routine that everyone follows:

1. The mail should be sorted immediately if possible, or at the very least, get rid of the junk. This will reduce the clutter.

2. It is critical that one place be designated as the holding place for bills. It can be anything from a shoebox to a specific drawer to a priceless antique accessory. Wherever that place is, everyone - spouses, children, cleaning help, and aides –must follow the routine.

3. For those with the beginnings of Alzheimer’s or someone living with a person with Alzheimer’s, it is critical to emphasize the routine over and over again. If the person with Alzheimer’s is getting the mail, the routine that’s emphasized is simply to put all the mail in the one designated place. Someone else must do the sorting.

4. Keep a shredder handy. The following are some of the things that should be put through the shredder, not just in the wastebasket: anything with an account number on it; credit card solicitations; convenience checks that come with your credit card bill - those blank checks that they give you to use to pay other bills.

And finally, be practical. Don’t set up a system that’s too fussy for everyone to keep up with for the long haul. It doesn’t matter whether you use a stack of empty shoe boxes or this really cool $198 mail organizer I saw in a catalog, there’s one constant. The mail comes every day, and every day you’ve got to deal with it.