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Have you ever looked at your email and gasped at how many emails you have to read. I have! When you have more than one email it is so easy to skip an email, anciently delete an important email or forget to pay a bill if you have paperless billing set up. We all have done it. It’s just part of the digital life.

Several years ago I was sitting in the floor with several stacks of papers, it was my day to sort all the bills that had come in the mail that week. As you can tell I hated spending my time doing this. I decided it was time for my family to look at paperless billing. My husband was not on board with this at the time, he liked the idea that every month we would receive a bill it would come on a certain day, and we would schedule to pay the bill. He liked the system, but there was one catch, I was the one doing all the organization! I hated the system! It worked for years but then my kids became teens and had busy schedules and had added lots to my day. I would have stacks of papers sitting every where. I am one that hates clutter. And our bill system created a lot of clutter, and lots of Rubbermaid bins of organized papers over the years.

It Was Time For a Change!

I started looking for a way to keep organized and not forget to pay our bills on time. I read so many blogs of how families would organize their life. Most families just used the bill station, a place where you drop the mail to be sorted later in the week when you had time. No one had a better idea, we all used basically the same system dump in one spot and sort later.

The lady that was helping me with a phone problem ask me if I had considered going paperless?  This was years ago when paperless first started out. I opted in to go paperless on my cell phone bill. I would get my bill every month and I would print it out, so much for going paperless right?

Then later I created a label  in my google account to stick each cell phone bill after I paid the bill. I just left it in my email until I paid it then I filed it away. Going paperless was a new thing for my family. We weren’t even sure if it was safe from being hacked. This was way back in 2006! We heard of so many email platforms that were hacked and vital information was stolen!

In a later post this month I will share how to keep your email safe from being hacked without you knowing it.

I Had to Find Something That Would Work!

I get around 200 emails every day, and most have to be read daily because I work remotely and that is how my employers contact me. My paperless phone bill was being swallowed up by all my work emails. I try to do (inbox 0) as much as I can but if life is busy that is just not going to happen everyday. Well 200 emails became 800 emails after a couple of days and my phone bill was in the sea of emails! I had to find another system for my bills.

When I was on a system chat with several co workers and our team leader, some how the topic came up about forgetting bills due to high inbox emails. We all were dealing with the same problem and we came up with the answer, create a house email! It was funny at first, our houses had their own email.

I Set Up a House Email

I set up my house email several days later. We used a very simple email, here is an example to give you a few ideas 123anystreet@ or you could use letters, abchouse@   We decided the only things that go into the email were to be house related important things to be paid or bank summaries. No signing up for all those store shopper cards using this email! Then over time we added things from doctors and our son was in his last year of school and I used our house email for anything the school needed to send me. That was pretty much it. It was so easy to keep up with all our bills and no mess on the counter or my desk. I used labels within the google email to have each bill or correspondence a place to live in our house email.

Years later when Evernote came along I started using Evernote at first for work, then I saw how easy the platform was to use and then I started using Evernote for our Bill organization. I’ll talk about using Evernote in another blog post later on in the month. I’ll show you how to set it up for an easy way to keep track of everything.

If you have a similar way you keep up with all your bills please let me know in the comments. I would love to hear from you and hear about your failures and successes with bill organization and going paperless.

Come back next Tuesday for the next post in the series where I show you what features to look for when searching for an email provider.

Have a great day!

Sherry