I’m just curious about how other people pay their bills… I’ve heard of people putting envelopes in dated sections of a mail organizer, then filling each one on that date, stamping, and mailing… that seems more than a little antiquated to me.

For us, we just have a few bills. I have a bookmark folder on my browser called money/bills, and I have the billpay sites bookmarked there. Around the 15th or so, I know the bills are likely to be ready, so I check and pay them if they’re already posted. I also have them set up to email me when they’re ready (though usually I see that they’re posted and pay them BEFORE the email gets to me). The payment just comes directly from our checking account.

Except for netflix, which goes on our credit card (which we pay off each month). Our rent is also a credit card one… we go to the leasing office (just down the street) sometime toward the end of each month and pay that way.

The “bill” I’m the worst about paying on time is our allowances, which go into our personal checking accounts. But I took a tip from my dad and that’s helping. When I was little, we used to get behind on our allowances sometimes, and it was hard for him to remember (with 4 kids) who was owed how many weeks’ worth. So he had a chart with each week and we’d sign/initial when we had gotten our allowance for that week. I liked to save up several weeks at a time, and then get one big allowance. I loved signing all those lines.

Anyway, my current solution to remembering allowances is much simpler. I just have an index card with Jan, Feb, Mar, etc on it… and when I transfer money to our accounts for our allowance, I just put a check mark next to it. Simple and effective.

Also… I don’t want to do a totally separate post about this because, well, I have a lot of “homemade pizza” posts. And none of them totally rock. But I did it again.

It is uuuuuugly… but if my memory serves me, this is the tastiest one I’ve made yet. It’s funny because while  I was making the dough, I was thinking “Wow, this is just like my honey wheat bread dough… but instead of wheat flour and bread flour, it’s all-purpose. And instead of canola oil, it’s olive oil, and instead of honey, there’s sugar,” and  that, my friends, is when I realized that dough is dough. And you can change things up easily enough, and it’ll still WORK. I’m a little slow sometimes.

The sauce was fantastic this time. I used tomato paste instead of spaghetti sauce, though I did have some leftover spaghetti sauce I stirred in. I also added some herbs to it.

The cheese was just the low-moisture mozzarella from a bag… good cheese would’ve been better, but I didn’t feel like dealing with slicing or grating it. The sprinkly topping is garlic salt, romano cheese, oregano, and basil.

PS Who else watched LOST tonight? No spoilers for people who didn’t see it please, but… gah, I love that show.