“If everyone paid their bills like Tim, I wouldn’t have a job!”

This is an actual quote from my utility company. I am unusually good at paying bills, and I barely even think about it. How do I do it?

I have a system.

But it wasn’t always this way. I used to wake up at 2am in a cold sweat, wondering if I had forgotten to pay a bill this month. My strategy was a simple one, but I poor one: I waited to get a reminder from the company.

I shudder to think of it now. It seems so fragile, but it’s what many of us do. If I owe someone money they will tell me, right?

But waiting for a reminder from your utility company is a losing strategy. It only takes one mistake to ruin your life, at least temporarily. Reminders can be misplaced, either by the postal carriers or by your spam filter. And reminders are reactive, you either have to stop everything and pay the bill instantly upon receiving it, or you risk placing it in “the stack” and forgetting about it.

My advice: don’t pay bills reactively. Instead, build a system.

It will give you peace of mind, and help you to quickly and efficiently accomplish this routine chore.

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On This Page

• 1 Autopay?

• 2 A Simple System for Paying Bills in Obsidian

• 3 Documenting Your Bills

• 3.1 Step 1: List Your Responsibilities

• 3.2 Payment Records

• 3.3 Setting Up Reminders

• 3.4 Recurring Reminders with Obsidian Tasks

• 4 Conclusion

Autopay?

Now I know some of you smart alecs are going to immediately go to the comments section and type “just use autopay!” But NO! That is not the solution. Autopay just kicks the can down the road. Autopay entices you into forgetting, and as soon as you forget Murphy will have his way with you.

My wife, before she was my wife, set up autopay shortly before her credit card expired. Her internet company “forgot” to tell her when several payments failed to go through. By the time she found out about it, she owed nearly $900 in backpayments and late fees. Owch. (she cancelled the company and we refuse to ever use them again. Midwesterners don’t forget)

Your credit card will get stolen, and you’ll have to cancel it. You’ll change bank accounts for a job. There are dozens of ways for autopay to go wrong, and for you to end up with late fees, or termination of service.

So how do we prevent it?

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Paying bills is not sexy, but I can honestly say that this is one of my favorite systems in Obsidian. It’s as simple as can be, but extremely effective. Since building this, I haven’t missed paying a single bill, and I’ve never experienced more peace of mind when it comes to bills.

After setting this system up, I experienced true peace-of-mind for the first time as an adult.

So let’s get to the system!

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A Simple System for Paying Bills in Obsidian

My bill pay system has two components. Documentation, and reminders.

Documentation should be done in Obsidian, or a similarly link-enabled note taking application. Reminders can be done in nearly any to-do app, including Obsidian, but with a few caveats.

Let’s talk about documentation first.

Documenting Your Bills

Documentation is key, because paying bills becomes forgettable and routine after a while. That’s why you (and I used to) wake up in the middle of the night wondering if you paid something: once you’ve paid, you forget.

Documentation needs three components: you need to document what bills you are responsible for, when they need to be paid, and you need a record of payment after you pay them.

And ideally, we want this system to be as easy to maintain as possible. How do we do that?

Step 1: List Your Responsibilities

The first thing to do is to create a new note in Obsidian. Do that, and call it “Bills MOC”. Now make a list of all the bills you are responsible for.

Note: MOC stands for “Map of Content”. Learn more about MOCs.

I like to use a table for this, it makes your records cleaner and easier to scan.

Your table might look something like this:

# Bills MOC

## Utilities

| Company Name | Due Date | Frequency | Type         |
| ------------ | -------- | --------- | ------------ |
| Electrico    | 15th     | Monthly   | Electricity  |
| GasRUs       | 5th      | Monthly   | Gas          |
| AquaFina     | 20th     | Bi-Month  | Water        |

Note: you can use the Command Palette to create tables. Search for “insert table”.

Write down the name of each company, the frequency, and the due date. Then do the same with any other recurring bills that come to you. Insurance is probably one you are paying, as well as any subscriptions. Your final list might look something like this:

## Utilities
| Company Name | Due Date | Frequency | Type         |
| ------------ | -------- | --------- | ------------ |
| Electrico    | 15th     | Monthly   | Electricity  |
| GasRUs       | 5th      | Monthly   | Gas          |
| AquaFina     | 20th     | Bi-Month  | Water        |

## Insurance
| Company Name | Due Date | Frequency | Type         |
| ------------ | -------- | --------- | ------------ |
| Lifey        | Jan 5th  | Yearly    | Life         |
| No Wetness   | Jan 3rd  | Yearly    | Umbrella     |
| ProTectCarz  | Jan+July | Bi-Yearly | Auto         |

## Fun
| Company Name | Due Date | Frequency | Type         |
| ------------ | -------- | --------- | ------------ |
| Netflix      | 15th     | Monthly   | Video        |
| Prime        | 5th      | Monthly   | "free" shipping |

The “fun” bills are less necessary to document here: after all, if you stop paying for those services they just stop working, there’s no penalty (as far as I have heard), so you may not need to document them. Doesn’t hurt to document them though, maybe just so you’re aware that you are paying for them.

Don’t worry about completeness with this list: as you pay bills this month, come back to this document and make sure each bill you pay is listed here. It shouldn’t take long for you to have a complete list.

This one simple note takes care of two of our concerns: the “what” and the “when”. Next we need to add records.

Payment Records

Next up, we need to record when we make payments. I like to create a separate note for this, just to keep each note relatively small and easy to maintain. I might call it “Bills Paid”, or something easily searchable like that. Then we create a simple record of each bill that we pay.

There are two ways to do this: we could add a new table row for every payment. I did that for a while, but I found that it got cluttered and hard to parse quickly. Instead, I recommend you have two separate tables: one for monthly payments, and the other for yearly. That might look like this:

# Bills Paid
| Month | Electric | Gas    | Water      |
| ----- | -------- | ------ | ---------- |
| Jan   | $78      | $60    | $123       |
| Feb   | $90      | $63    | 0          |
| March | $65      | $73    | $110       |

Each month, just add a new row. For bills that are paid once every two or three months, simply add a zero on the months you don’t pay them.

Remember that this record doesn’t need to record who you paid, that’s what the first note is for. This is a simple record that you have paid for all of your obligations, nothing more.

I like this structure because it also serves as a reminder. On any given month you can check this table: if a dollar amount exists, then you’ve paid. If not, then you haven’t. It gives you a single source of truth, which I find immensely valuable.

Now you may have noted a flaw in this plan. I hear you ask, “If I can’t remember to pay my bills, what makes you think I’ll remember to update these notes when I do pay?”

Excellent question, and that leads us to our reminder system.

Setting Up Reminders

Documenting your bills is important, and a helpful exercise even if you don’t struggle to pay your bills on time. But documentation is only as good as the work you put into it.

You could spend hours creating the perfect documentation system, but as soon as it is out of date, it is worthless. When creating documentation, you also have to put in place systems to keep it up-to-date.

So we come to reminders. Every task system that I am aware of allows you to set up some sort of a recurring reminder, and that will be the missing piece to make our bill pay system sing.

In Obsidian, I use the Tasks plugin, which also has recurring tasks. I’ll walk you through how I set this up in Obsidian, but you can use whatever task manager you like. As long as it has recurring tasks and reminders, it will work.

Recurring Reminders with Obsidian Tasks

If you’re new to Tasks, check out my Beginner’s Guide to Tasks.

Tasks allows you to create simple plain-text tasks in Obsidian, with all the amenities of a task management app. Tasks supports due dates, recurring tasks, priorities, done dates, and much more.

For our purposes we will use due dates and recurrence. Create a new note called “Pay Bills”, or something similar. This is where we will set up our tasks.

Then create a task for each bill you are responsible for. That might look like this:

- [ ] Pay Electric Bill
- [ ] Pay Gas bill
- [ ] Pay Life Insurance
- [ ] Pay Water company

And so on. Then we just need to add due dates and recurrence. Reference your Bills MOC from earlier, and add due dates a few days before the day that the bill comes due.

You can just type due dates out with Tasks, but I find it easier to use the Tasks overlay. With your cursor on the task in question, press alt+T, or use the command palette and search for “edit task”. That will show you an overlay that looks something like this:


Notice the “recurs” and “due” fields? I like to pay my bills all at once, so most of my bills are set up to recur “every month on the 10th”, with a due date of the 10th of the month. But you can set it up however you like.

If you don’t want to use Tasks in Obsidian, this should work just as well in your preferred task app. To my knowledge, they all support these two basic features.

Conclusion

Paying bills is a fact of life for many of us, and this system for paying bills in Obsidian has been enormously helpful to give me peace of mind over the years. I hope it is helpful for you as well.