Banking at Home

CEBU, Philippines - My wife and I use a particular bank, and wife pays most of our bills through the bank's online program. She stays home with our young son, but she runs all of our finances from the apartment.

We don't pay all our bills online - some stores aren't yet set up to handle online transactions, so I still end up dropping some checks in the mail. While you cant do everything online, more and more this is where we're headed. For the majority of monthly bills that you get, you can even set them up to be paid automatically each month.

Another thing people can do is keep track of their finances online. There are some excellent software programs that you can buy and load on your computer. As long as you're willing to input things like how much you're spending on gas, or what you just paid when you come home from the supermarket, you can track every dime you're spending. These days, with online banking and the ability to download, you don't even have to input as much as you used to because you can download things directly from your online banking account right into your software program.

This is particularly helpful for people who are either retired and on a fixed income or starting out and needing to save. People can be shocked at how much they're spending in restaurants, or for gas, because they have this idea in their minds: "I already paid for the car, so the car doesn't cost me anything and my expenses should be low." Too often people tend to think that only the wealthy people have a need to really track their spending, but actually the rest of us have more of a margin of error.

- from Fast Forward By Alfred C. Sikes with Ellen Pearlman (Morrow)