Household reminders and tracking
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@Tim_G said in Household reminders and tracking:
@JaredBusch said in Household reminders and tracking:
What does everyone use for household reminders and tracking of things such as bills and the trash holiday schedules, and such?
Currently our stuff is fractured over devices and methods. The wife and I and looking at a centralization point for this.
A calendar is simple, but does not lend itself to listing bill amounts. It is easy to make a recurring event for say the cellular, electric, or gas bill. But then what do we do about the amount? As that can vary from month to month.
We really like Mint (mint.com) for the financials, our Outlook.com calendars and Cortana for scheduling/planning/appointments/etc, and also we have a large dry-erase white-board hanging on the wall. 99% of all reoccurring bills are paid automagically, but Mint still alerts in advance which is always nice.
P.S. Our daughter likes the white-board too!
I've used Mint in the past but they continue to have issues integrating with my bank. It worked great for forecasting as well. My wife and I, at the moment, use a Google Calendar as 90% of our bills are automatically paid.
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How about Alexa? You can connect it to a google calendar. So you would setup a calendar/account add everything to it manually connect it to Alexa and then you can ask Alexa what's on your calendar for the day.
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So just looking into this because of the topic there appear to be a wide range of software, and one of the most popular from what I can find is GNUCash.
Opensource, and cross platform compatible (Windows and Android) it seems to have what you may be looking for.
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You can also tell Siri to set a reminder for your $50 electric bill and give it a date.
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Most of ours are calendar reminders in Zoho that we shared. Some things like Comcast that never change are auto paid.
We have PNC so I use the virtual wallet stuff also for personal accounts. But I have a spread over PNC, AMEX, Capital One, and Wave for the business accounting.
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Google Calendar Events. I set up an account which we both have access to and wall mounted an old monitor I had with a Raspberry Pi. It's literally just to display it. We update it via web. 100% of our bills are automatic payments. I just log in once a month to verify that they were paid. I've had weird bank issues before where i had the money to pay but they denied the payment before so I'm just careful.
We also use this for upcoming events and stuff. Example: This weekend I'm apparently hanging out with her friends.
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A Google calendar event is what I was looking at, but I wanted more options.
GnuCash would be nice if I wanted a full system.
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@JaredBusch said in Household reminders and tracking:
A Google calendar event is what I was looking at, but I wanted more options.
GnuCash would be nice if I wanted a full system.
Does your bank have anything? I know we can schedule payments with Virtual Wallet and I "think" AMEX and Capital One do that also.
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@stacksofplates said in Household reminders and tracking:
@JaredBusch said in Household reminders and tracking:
A Google calendar event is what I was looking at, but I wanted more options.
GnuCash would be nice if I wanted a full system.
Does your bank have anything? I know we can schedule payments with Virtual Wallet and I "think" AMEX and Capital One do that also.
Of course our bank offers various things, but that does not help you know that you have gotten the last bill amount in your email and made a note to update the payment for the month, etc.
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@JaredBusch said in Household reminders and tracking:
@stacksofplates said in Household reminders and tracking:
@JaredBusch said in Household reminders and tracking:
A Google calendar event is what I was looking at, but I wanted more options.
GnuCash would be nice if I wanted a full system.
Does your bank have anything? I know we can schedule payments with Virtual Wallet and I "think" AMEX and Capital One do that also.
Of course our bank offers various things, but that does not help you know that you have gotten the last bill amount in your email and made a note to update the payment for the month, etc.
If you have an Android phone and Google Now (Or whatever they are calling it these days) when you are emailed a bill it reminds you with Google Now when that bill is coming due. I get a reminder 7 days prior, 3 days prior, and the day it is due.
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Here is my method. I filter all finances through a high reward credit card, any pay the balance in full before interest hits. Amazon points for days. Savings withdrawals are automated on Payday, so like retirement, I never even see the money. I then use GoodBudget.com for basic envelope budgets. On payday, I use a scheduled transaction to fill the envelopes. Me and my wife put every expense in at the checkout line, and we both instantly know where we are on spending. I had enough data to see what my monthly expenses are and I was able to set my savings and spending cash budgets when I started this method so I was always within my means, and net worth is going the in positive every month.
I keep all of my bills coming to my house via paper. They go in a stack, and I schedule to pay them via online before the due date, preferably on the next payday. Then I recycle the paper, or use it in my compost bins, so I don't feel as bad for the waste. These also go into Goodbudget, so if bills go over budget, we move money from the spending cash envelope to cover it. Automatic withdrawals are scheduled in GoodBudget as well so I don't forget to remove the amount from Budget.
All other scheduling, travel, haircuts, kids events go into a shared calendar using Apple iCloud.
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@JaredBusch said in Household reminders and tracking:
@stacksofplates said in Household reminders and tracking:
@JaredBusch said in Household reminders and tracking:
A Google calendar event is what I was looking at, but I wanted more options.
GnuCash would be nice if I wanted a full system.
Does your bank have anything? I know we can schedule payments with Virtual Wallet and I "think" AMEX and Capital One do that also.
Of course our bank offers various things, but that does not help you know that you have gotten the last bill amount in your email and made a note to update the payment for the month, etc.
I guess I misunderstood what you wanted. I thought you just wanted a reminder for the payment. If it's not autopay we just have a reminder and then we look at whatever the bill is and pay it at that time.
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@stacksofplates said in Household reminders and tracking:
@JaredBusch said in Household reminders and tracking:
@stacksofplates said in Household reminders and tracking:
@JaredBusch said in Household reminders and tracking:
A Google calendar event is what I was looking at, but I wanted more options.
GnuCash would be nice if I wanted a full system.
Does your bank have anything? I know we can schedule payments with Virtual Wallet and I "think" AMEX and Capital One do that also.
Of course our bank offers various things, but that does not help you know that you have gotten the last bill amount in your email and made a note to update the payment for the month, etc.
I guess I misunderstood what you wanted. I thought you just wanted a reminder for the payment. If it's not autopay we just have a reminder and then we look at whatever the bill is and pay it at that time.
I'm still not entirely sure what he wants. Who cares what the amount is as far as a reminder to pay a bill is - when you log into the payment system to make the payment, it should tell you what you owe - unless you're using your bank/financial institution to send the payment, in that case, then yeah, you'd need to know.
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@Dashrender said in Household reminders and tracking:
@stacksofplates said in Household reminders and tracking:
@JaredBusch said in Household reminders and tracking:
@stacksofplates said in Household reminders and tracking:
@JaredBusch said in Household reminders and tracking:
A Google calendar event is what I was looking at, but I wanted more options.
GnuCash would be nice if I wanted a full system.
Does your bank have anything? I know we can schedule payments with Virtual Wallet and I "think" AMEX and Capital One do that also.
Of course our bank offers various things, but that does not help you know that you have gotten the last bill amount in your email and made a note to update the payment for the month, etc.
I guess I misunderstood what you wanted. I thought you just wanted a reminder for the payment. If it's not autopay we just have a reminder and then we look at whatever the bill is and pay it at that time.
I'm still not entirely sure what he wants. Who cares what the amount is as far as a reminder to pay a bill is - when you log into the payment system to make the payment, it should tell you what you owe - unless you're using your bank/financial institution to send the payment, in that case, then yeah, you'd need to know.
A bit of a two fold thing.
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The reminder/tracker to know we have not missed one. We currently pay certain things each week of the month. Once or twice over the last couple years we missed one. Obviously not a big deal. but still something we want to avoid.
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And a way to know how much to pay. Because the person receiving the email with the bill total is not the person paying the bills. Gas, Water, Electric vary form month to month with usage, for example.
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I do not like Mint and the other services I have found because I am not going to give some third party access to my bank account, cable account, water, electric, etc.
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Re Google Now: I am not a big user of Google services. I have a Gmail account. nothing goes there.
Everything goes to my daerma.com domain. The email is hosted on Google Apps (grandfathered free account thing).
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@JaredBusch said in Household reminders and tracking:
And a way to know how much to pay. Because the person receiving the email with the bill total is not the person paying the bills. Gas, Water, Electric vary form month to month with usage, for example.
Bre and I use an email group that we are both in and use it for the emails, but that was just a simple way we could solve that. I"m sure there is a better way.
As far as a tracker, I'm not sure other than doing a manual thing where you have to check something off or "agree" that you did pay it.
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I create a draft email on Monday and add to it over the week for shopping on Sunday.
