How to Pay Your Bills and Have FUN!
Does paying your bills feel like drudgery and stressful? I have found some ways to make writing those checks more fun and turn that time into a more creative and positive activity.
As a participant in 21 Secrets, an online art journaling workshop (which is having a Christmas in July sale right now) I have learned a way to have a little fun with those bills that come in the mail. Jo Bruhn, one of the instructors, leads a tutorial on making flowers with the beautiful papers which line the inside of your security envelopes. I've never really paid attention to these envelopes other than to make sure my information is not visible from outside. But after carefully opening and flattening them out, I found a beautiful range of patterned papers.
With all my bills, envelopes opened and flattened out, I outlined flowers, stems, and leaves with a black Sharpie and colored them in with highlighter pens. I carefully cut around the shapes and these beautiful blossoms are the result. You could doodle with markers, watercolor or use colored pencils to make a number of beautiful images to decorate your art journals or keep your kids busy while you tackle those bills.
Another technique I use to make bill paying a more positive endeavor, is to cross out all my balances and replace them with zeroes. I act AS IF all my balances are zero after I pay the creditor. This sends a strong message to my subconscious that I am debt free. (And I'm getting pretty close to that!) Finances are a serious business, but changing our attitudes about the money we send out is a positive step to having a good relationship with money.
The next step is to send payments out with a positive mental image. There is an affirmation I learned from a wonderful book, "The Wisdom of Florence Scovel Shinn". Her words, which she calls demonstrations, are an affirmation that go out with the money sent. So an affirmation I use from her book is "I pay my bills cheerfully and with a blessing". Yes, it sounds goofy, but it certainly changes my attitude while I'm writing checks and putting them in the mail.
So I encourage you to change your attitude when it comes to dealing with your finances each month. Make it a more creative positive process, and watch your abundance increase as a result.
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