You're committed to attacking your debt issues with intensity, but you're having trouble wrapping your brain around exactly how you're going to accomplish this Herculean feat when you can't even figure out what's due when or how you can stretch your cheeseburger paycheck to cover your steak dinner budget. How can you attack your account balances when you don't have a manageable system that's simple and easy to access? We're going to fix that today.



I call this the Clipboard for Cash method and it's a decidedly low-tech solution. First, use your high-tech computer to print off a couple of calendars - one for this month and one for next month. Next, attach them to a good old-fashioned clipboard. Now comes the fun part.

Gather up your stack of bills and sort through them individually, placing them into an ordered stack based on due-date, with the most pressing bills on top. This may sound like a simple, even juvenile system, but the idea here is to save you money, not look like the most sophisticated person you know.

Now as you go through the bills, write down the name of the creditor and the amount due on the calendar on its corresponding due date. When you're finished, you should have a good idea of what your bill situation is as far as when bills are due. Now you can fill in the rest of your monthly bills - pre-authorized payments that come out of your checking account on an automatic basis, lunch money for the kids' lunches at school, etc.

Now you've got all your bills written down in a centralized location and all the bills are together. Place the stack of bills on the clipboard and the system is ready to run. A single glance at the clipboard will tell you when your bills are due, so there's no more guesswork on your part or having to remember your bill schedule. You also have the peace of mind of knowing that you have the envelope and the bill together so you don't have to search for them.

Here's where the savings kicks in. On payday, you know at a glance what has to go out, so you can pay bills in a fraction of the time. Any money you have left in your checking account right before payday should be applied to a bill - any bill - so that you're paying on something and leaving yourself almost destitute.

When you pay an pre-authorized bill, flip your calendar page to the next month and fill it in and as bills trickle in (or flood, whichever is the case) through the month you can write them down, and you're good to go.

If you're more comfortable keeping the transactions on your computer, you can do that as well. The key element of this plan isn't to develop a difficult system, because it's a lot like programming your VCR: If it's too difficult you just won't do it. And then you can kiss your savings goodbye.

Now that you've taken some proactive steps to get your budget under control by figuring out what you have going out - and when - you'll be more confident in your bill-paying and much less likely to miss a due date. Avoiding late fees shouldn't be a problem for you now that you've got this plan in place.