Procrastination doesn’t just cost you your sanity or stress you out, it also hits you hard in the wallet.
It costs you money. Cold hard cash.
The Simple Forgotten Task
If you leave a electric bill unopened on the table you don’t pay the bill immediately and end up forgetting about it because you procrastinated, you could have your electricity cut off.
Underneath the surface, maybe you just weren’t organized, and didn’t know that your electric bill comes in on the 25th of every month, and you didn’t budget accordingly for it.
So you ran out of available cash when the bill came in the mail.
And a deeper issue may be that you simply don’t have the money to pay the bill, regardless of what darn date the bill arrived.
So, loathe to pay for the bill with a credit card, hoping to wait until the last possible moment, you procrastinated on the task.
For you, as it is for me, procrastinating may be the easy solution, and finding the solution just seems annoyingly difficult.
The Consequences
In all of those situations above, resulting from a simple electric bill, procrastination will cost you money in the short term, long term and be a continued nuisance in your life.
In the short term, you will now have to pay a fee for having missed last month’s payment.
In the long term, if you don’t get organized with a list of dates of when all your statements and bills arrive, you won’t be able to budget your cash flow accordingly.
And in the even longer term, it’s a sign that you don’t have your finances under control if you don’t have the savings to pay for it.
So you used credit instead. And credit, costs even more money in interest and late fees.
All from a simple electric bill that had been forgotten.
The Solution
- Acknowledge the situation
- Find the root of the problem
- Research for a solution
- Fix it
Acknowledge you didn’t pay the bill on time and that cost your electricity to be cut off.
Find the root of the problem, you were either unorganized so you missed the date and/or simply didn’t have the cash.
Research for the solution by writing down the statement dates of all of your bills on a list tacked up on your fridge or put in your organizer, and/or starting to learn how to budget & track your expenses so you can find the cash.
Fix it, by sticking to the plan you’ve created for yourself.
Once you go through the motions of The Solution the way I did, you may find that it’s so difficult after all.
