Mike, my co-blogger here at Lending Club, wrote about the process that he follows with each bill. Mine is a bit different – it’s more of a “2.0” version of the process. Here is how I handle each bill:

Using services

This is similar to Mike’s. You have to utilize some service for a bill to be generated.

Bill not physically delivered

Whenever I can, and with almost every service it is possible, I cancel my paper delivery as soon as I set up the service and instead opt-in to email notifications. Most banks and other financial institutions are great at this and will send you email notifications whenever new bills are ready.

Set up automatic payments

Usually I will submit my credit card as my payment method, and whenever I can, I set up automatic billing. This way, I will never forget to pay a bill and incur late fees.

Pay/Checkup on 5th and 20th

For those companies that do not let me set up automatic billing or if it’s a bill on an irregular schedule, I make a note on my calendar to manually review these items twice a month.

Setup a dedicated email/folder

I have set up a different email account that only contains my bills and other financial notifications. This makes it really easy to manage; if the email is unread or unmarked, then the item still needs to be addressed. Otherwise, I know everything is handled properly.

Filing/records

I no longer keep copies of bills. Most companies have sites that you can now easily access and print all of your previous bills and statements. This makes keeping local hard copies of the bills a waste of paper and space.

Quarterly review

Every three months, I scan all of my bills and statements for irregularities and oddities. So far, there have been none.

Alerts

Most banks and credit cards will allow you to set up alerts for different types of activities. I have my accounts set to send me an email whenever a charge over $100 is made, so the potential for large fraud is minimized.

The idea is to spend as little time and resources as possible handling bills, and this process helps me achieve this. The next step would be to outsource the process altogether.

On Tuesday evening, we made a set of scheduled enhancements to our Web site like we do every month. On Wednesday, the combination of the site enhancements and record-setting levels of activity on certain pages, led to issues that prevented some pages from loading for part of the day.

We know that some customers visiting our Web site on Wednesday either could not access their account or had difficulties with certain areas of the site. We immediately focused our efforts on addressing the issues and believe we have resolved them. I just want to note that our Web site and customer data have remained fully secure and all account details for both borrowers and investors were fully updated on schedule.

As the popularity of Lending Club continues to grow, I want you to know that we are completely focused on giving consistent, anytime access to the lending platform and your account information.

If you were affected by this issue yesterday, I would like to sincerely apologize. Thank you for your continued support.

Best,

Renaud

It seems that outlet shopping has evolved considerably within the past quarter century. What was once a way for manufacturers to dump irregular merchandise has become a way to highlight the brand and offer a flagship destination for brand loyalists.

Having grown up near one of the largest outlet centers in the world, Woodbury Commons in New York State, I’ve always thought of outlet shopping as a normal method for finding unique products at great prices. Whether consumers benefit more from the perfect products sold at marginally discounted prices or slightly imperfect products traditionally sold at significant discounts depends largely on the items they are looking for. In either case, brand name products can often be found at thrift stores for even less. Still, outlets can offer great prices to those who would never consider second-hand options.

Outlets also give shoppers access to many different products that might not be available from alternative sources. Many outlet brands are typically sold in department stores, where they only receive limited shelf space and must compete with similar brands. At the outlets, entire stores are dedicated to each brand, offering a wider selection of products and prices. They may also offer products that have been discontinued and are no longer available from any other source. Since customers are able to buy directly from the manufacturer, prices tend to be lower as well.

A trip to your local outlet shopping center has the potential to save you money. If the low prices cause you to buy more than you would have otherwise, you could end up spending more money. But if you limit your purchases to the best deals and only those things you would have purchased elsewhere at higher prices, you stand to gain the most from the experience.

Is outlet shopping a part of your normal spending routine?

A few years back, I described the importance of knowing what your time is worth. As income levels and leisure time fluctuate, recalculating your time worth makes sense. You’ll want to ensure that your cost-benefit analysis uses accurate information. Otherwise, you may reach incorrect decisions.

Over time, many of the parameters used to calculate the value of your time can vary considerably. You may be earning more money, thanks to raises, or significantly less money if you’ve had periods of unemployment. The cost of childcare may have increased, or been significantly reduced as young children reach school age. Changes in your spouse’s situation can have a similar effect. All of these factors, and more, contribute to the value of your time.

You may also find that you have different “time worths” depending on how you plan to pay for things. If a particular service would take you 2 hours to do yourself or $100 to pay someone else to do it, you might conclude that it would be worth paying someone else to do the work if your time is worth more than $50/hr. But you have different ways to be able to pay for this service. You might choose between putting in some overtime at work and selling some services online. For overtime, you’d have to earn a lot more than $100 to have an extra $100 of take-home pay because of taxes. Depending on what you sell online, it may not be subject to taxes, so a $100 sale would truly net you $100.

For that matter, you might have more than one job. Knowing the value of your time for each could help you to choose the most appropriate place to put in extra time. For me, there’s a huge difference between an extra hour at my day job and an hour’s worth of extra work on my blog.

The simple truth is that our decisions are only as good as the information we have on hand. By keeping an accurate estimate of the value of your time, in its different forms, you’ll be able to make the best decisions between doing work yourself and paying others to do it for you.

How many different ways can you think of to value your time?

As recently reported by indexcreditcards.com, so far 2009 has shown that credit card companies are markedly on the rise across all consumer sectors, a trend that all borrowers should be aware of. Check out these fresh weekly stats as gathered via a survey of several major banks including American Express, Capital One, Wells Fargo and others:

• Average consumer credit card rate, overall market: 14.17%
• Average credit card rate, non-reward consumer cards: 12.80%
• Average reward credit card rate: 14.76%
• Average student credit card rate: 14.15%
• Average business credit card rate (non-reward): 11.77%
• Average business reward credit card rate: 12.84%

It’s important to note that these are taking effect across the credit spectrum, as the data also reflects changes in

“the very lowest listed rates, those reserved for customers with the very best credit. This week those averages were also up, to 11.21% for the market as a whole (previously 10.84%), with a 9.77% average for non-reward cards (previously 9.29%) and a 11.83% average for consumer cards with rewards (previously 11.50%).”

Clearly, there’s never been a better time for those with good credit to explore alternative ways to borrow money.