{Time management} Scheduling regular payments

I want to share something that made me feel oh-so-accomplished last week.

It was during my power hour (which, incidentally, is not very regular, and happens randomly every two weeks or so).

I made a list of all my “life admin” tasks and realised that we have to make a payment to the school to secure our kids’ places for next year.

Now, even though the money is ready in the bank account, I really don’t like to pay things any earlier than I need to. It’s a little money quirk I have where I prefer the money in my own account drawing its little bit of interest 🙂

And then I realised… I can schedule a payment to go off 3 – 4 days before it’s due.

Which is exactly what I did.

I can now relax because the mental weight is off my shoulder and the school will get paid on time.

I use this scheduling payments feature to pay the regular school fees every month, and the nanny’s monthly salary. It’s so easy and I love not needing to think about it at all because gone are the days when my memory was razor-sharp and I knew at any given point in the month which payments needed to be made…

I set the scheduled payment up once and leave the bank’s system to do its magic every month :)) When Nanny S gets a salary increase, I go in and make the change, and again, the automatic magic happens like clockwork.

Automation is a beautiful thing.

I do bank with the turquoise bank (for the fellow South Africans) but I’m sure all the banks have this feature.

These two payments happen aside from my monthly tithe and the transfer into my savings account, which I like to do when my salary hits my account, as a conscious, intentional action.

Interestingly enough, my mother-in-law and I chatted about this recently and she said she prefers to have no regular payments going off her account automatically. The only ones she does have are her insurance payments.