Home Office Answers

 If your home office could benefit from having a few less pieces of paper try switching to on-line banking and paying your bills on-line.  Why?  Paying on-line helps you reduce paper clutter and helps you turn your home office green.

No more paper statements in your mailbox

Most of the companies I use offer an option to stop receiving statements by mail. That’s almost better than eliminating your junk mail- that’s a topic for another day.

How much paper can you eliminate in your office?

Cell phone bill 10 pages a month- gone
Each Credit Card Statement 4 pages per month- gone
Bank Statements 3 pages per month-gone
Car payment statement 1 page per month-gone
Electric Bill 2 pages per month- gone

AND don’t forget the annoying ads and return envelopes that are always stuffed in with every statement- all gone.

Signing up for online statements can single handedly reduce the paper in your home office by 30+ pages a month that’s a whopping 360 pages of paper a year GONE.

But the green and clutter reducing benefit to on-line banking don’t stop there 

No more checks to printEvery month you save the cost of using a several checks, the use of your printer and your ink to print the checks.
Eliminate your postage expense

Use a calendar to note when statements and bills are due.
 You will no longer have that paper bill staring you in the face while you work, so
 be sure to set up your calendar to remind you to pay the bill just in case your  
 email notification gets caught in a spam folder.

Set up Folders on your computer
If you already have a filing system you like for your paper bills, set up the same folders on your computer.  When you view your statement on-line use Green Print, make a pdf copy of your statement and save it in the folder you created.

A word of caution here. Make your pdf copy each month when you pay the bill. 
I learned the hard way some companies remove the statements a few eeeks after the bill has been paid.

Make and keep good notes on your user names and passwords
I have found paying bills on-line to be much quicker than writing the physical checks as long as I know how to log into the account.  Thankfully security is getting tighter at most companies for the on-line access, but that also means it can be harder to regain entry if you have lost your user information.  Don’t let this scare you off.  Set up a digital word document or a physical paper document with your entire account log in information, put it in a secure place and you’ll be set.

How do you use on-line banking to make your home office green?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 3:39 pm and is filed under Paper Saver. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.