Was there ever anything more challenging to a parent's powers of organisation than Notes From School. Every day they fly at us, with news of non-uniform days, school trips to be paid for, cake fairs, PTA meetings and the rest.
Family life just seems to attract paperwork like bees to honey. So as Spring is (just about) on its way, let's look at some of the easiest ways to get on top of the household admin. It won't take as long as you think to restore order. To help you on your way, here are some top tips from Allfiled.com for taking a giant step towards paperwork bliss:
- Cancel any subscriptions, policies, warranties or direct debits for products and services you haven't used in the last six months – if you aren't using them, why pay for them?
- Move all your offline accounts and register for online accounts where possible to cut down reliance on post and volume paperwork – and it's more eco-friendly too.
- Reduce the stresses of household finance by creating a separate 'bills' bank account with a high interest rate and transfer enough money at the beginning of each month from your personal or joint account to meet all of your family monthly commitments.
- Use an empty shoe box for each month of the year and store all of the receipts from your purse or handbag for everything you buy in that month. After one year, discard the first month of receipts and then start again.
- Make a photocopy or scan of every family passport and store them online somewhere safe so you can locate them quickly in an emergency.
- Set yourself a reminder each year to review the utilities for your home, insurances for the cars, family members and pets and, if and when you can improve your mortgage arrangements. Doing this will ensure that you aren't paying over the odds to run your home and in many cases you will save money too.
- Shred unnecessary paperwork to reduce stress, mess and possible security risks.
- Pick three areas of family expense outside of the basic utilities and insurance and set a simple budget for how much you are happy to spend and then review each three months.
- If you want to by-pass some of these tips for a faster way to get on track with household admin, register with a free online admin management system which should help you to store all of your information in one place so that your household information is always at your fingertips
Source [Allfiled]