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Adulting. It’s not always fun. There are bills to pay and taxes to file and forms to fill out and appointments to keep.
Then you have kids, and the workload quintuples… per child! I’ll be honest, I shove a lot of that kind of ‘stuff’ in cupboards and put off pesky emails to the last possible moment. But there are some important life admin tasks that shouldn’t be ignored – in fact, they could make your life quite a bit cheaper and easier.
IMPORTANT LIFE ADMIN TASKS THAT WILL IMPROVE YOUR LIFE:
• STREAMLINE YOUR BILLS
It’s easy just to leave bills to roll over, but it only takes a few minutes online each year to see if you can get a better deal. Check if you can get protect your family’s financial future for less by searching for better critical illness, home and term life insurance quotes.
For household bills, sign up to a service like Look After My Bills, which does some of the important life admin for you, by finding the best new deal for gas and electricity before your existing tariff runs out, preventing you from automatically defaulting to a higher rate.
• BULK UP
Take a good look through your cupboards and work out what you can start buying in larger quantities. Last summer I stopped buying expensive bottles of hand and body wash and started buying 5l bottles of Faith in Nature Rose body wash. Not only is it much cheaper per litre when you buy in bulk, if you set up a regular subscription via Amazon the price is discounted even more.
I bought some reusable glass bottles off Etsy and fill them up to use them as both hand and body wash.
• MAKE PLANS
I had no idea how much money we were frittering away on food until lockdown forced me to take a forensic look at all our finances. When I totted up what we handed over every month – including shopping, work lunches, takeaways and our regular veggie delivery – it was shocking.
Straight away, I cut back on takeaways and started making meal plans to cut down on food wastage. After totally overhauling our diets (another of my surprising positives of lockdown), I finally learned to cook and we even started having a couple of vegetarian meals each week, which saved us more money on the cost of meat.
• BANK IT BABY
Check your bank accounts and cancel any direct debits you can no longer justify. It’s easy to disregard something small amounts, like £5 or £6, but when you add them up you could easily be losing £50 each month, which is £600 a year. That could pay for a family holiday (or at least a good chunk of it), or be earning you even more invested in a stocks and shares ISA.
• GET ORGANISED
A tidy home is a tidy mind, as the old saying goes. But here’s the thing – it’s totally true.
I’m not one of those naturally tidy people – the ones who have a place for everything and everything in its place. But last summer, with extra quarantine time on my hands, I decided to make the most of lockdown and sort some important life admin, and managed to get on top of my ridiculously messy cupboards. What a revelation!
OK, so they’re not as pristine as they were a year ago, but the sight of the shelves no longer fill me with absolute dread. I know (within reason) where to find everything now, and it really does make a difference to my day-to-day life. I even managed to sort out the baking cupboard a few weeks back, and now everything has its own container complete with fancy label on the front.
So there they are – five pieces of important life admin (AKA: tiny tweaks you can make in minutes that will instantly improve your life). What are you waiting for?
