It’s possible that a few of the accounts won’t actually be set up prior to the time my next payment is due, so I’ll have to monitor that as well. After I see that automatic payments are starting to come out, I can then switch over to electronic statements and help to reduce the volume of paper & clutter around the house, which is another motivating factor. I’ll keep updating everyone as I continue and let you know any pros and cons I find from doing this.

I know it sounds too good to be true, but it isn’t. Mint.com is free, no catch. The way they make their money is by analyzing your accounts giving you money-saving offers in the form of lower interest credit cards, loans or brokerage accounts. There’s no obligation to apply for anything. The only thing I’m cautious about is that Mint.com was purchased last year by Quicken Financial, which serves as a testimony to  what a popular site it is. I’ve run into a couple of problems with the site, in that a few of my accounts can’t be added, which gives me an incomplete picture, and sometimes accounts you’ve added run into problems and the balances aren’t updated. The second one is minor and only occurs on occasion.

I’ve also checked with all of my accounts to see which ones offer an auto-pay option. The good news is most of them do, and most of them will allow me to enter the information online. There are a couple of accounts that don’t, but I can still do those online manually. The only bad thing I ran across was there were a couple of accounts that require you to send a voided check. That wouldn’t be a problem, except for the fact that I’m totally out of checks. The last time I wrote a check prior to a couple of days ago was in December 2007! It’s rather ironic that I’ll have to order checks in order to start going paperless. As the saying goes, “You’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do.” I’m going to call my Credit Union tomorrow to order the least expensive checks I can get.

The last step I did tonight was to create a schedule of payments for all of my accounts for the entire year. It didn’t take too long, thanks to the magic of spreadsheets & autofill, but it still took me a couple of hours to log on to all of my accounts, get the payment info, then enter it into Quicken. You might be tempted to ask why I’d still be using Quicken if I’m using Mint.com. The answer is simple. With Quicken, I can enter future entries, and see how my current spending will affect the big picture. Mint.com only displays what has been spent, not what you’re going to be spending for the entire year. I’ll keep on posting about this as I make more progress, since it might be something you might be interested in checking into to.

I plan to read the entire Bible along with the rest of the congregation at our church. We’re using the One Year Bible Online reading plan. It seems like a lot of churches are doing that this year. I’m pretty excited, because while I know I’ve read most of the Bible, I can’t honestly say that I’ve read the whole book cover to cover (though I have listened to it twice). It will be nice too, because we will be using this for our Sunday morning adult Bible study before church. Of course, I’ll be using the Lutheran Study Bible my wife bought for me. :-)

One of the things I want to do this year is try to go as paperless as possible and sign up for direct payments for most of my bills. This has been a long time in the planning stages, so I can’t really call it a resolution. I would have put it in place last year, but all of the pieces didn’t fit together. It looks like things should come together by the end of this month. This will help me greatly, because I’m a pretty disorganized. There have been many times when my bills didn’t get paid because I simply forgot or misplaced the bill, and it resulted in a late charge, phone calls, shut-off notices, etc. I can’t imagine how nice it will be to have that monkey off my back!

Even if I can only get these two things accomplished, I believe it will be an even better year than 2009.