Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Life organized...binder-style!

During my adventures on Pinterest, I have come across these "home management binders" many times.  I have wanted to make for quite a while, but haven't {like a lot of my projects}.  I consider myself a organized person, but am always looking for ways to organize further.  One can never be too organized!
This binder is a way to keep your important papers in one place, for easy access.  One of the first blog posts I did was of my "command central" where I keep all the things I need on a daily basis to keep the household running. Here I have my planner and two cork boards with my meal menus, important schedules and school papers.  I also keep pens, my address book, stamps and papers to be filed in our file boxes where we keep our important-adult papers (which going through those is one my next projects!).  I wanted my binder to be an extension of this center, but I also wanted it to include my bills, some cleaning info and important contact numbers.  I had a bill binder and blogging binder and it was just too many binders!!  This binder would become the end all, be all of binders; combining all of this into one.
I started off getting a one-inch binder at good-old Target and some dividers. I have pinned MANY home management binder links so after going through all of these, I found some excellent printables for you!  All of these are free, which is great.  There are some ADORABLE ones on Etsy, but I just don't want to pay $$ for them.

My binder includes seven sections.  This is what I have in them:

1. Bills-
* My monthly bill recording sheet, which I have all our bills listed with due dates, what I paid and when. (this sheet I made myself)
* An annual bill schedule, where I keep track of any bills that are paid quarterly or weekly.
* A list of all our bill-related user names and passwords
* Utility/services contact sheet

2. Budgeting-
* currently empty, haha, BUT I plan on trying to stick to a better budget, so I want to make/find a nice monthly expense tracking sheet SOON!
* Lined paper, for jotting down info

3. Contacts-
* A list of couponing/store user names/passwords
* A list of all other miscellaneous user names and passwords
* A master list of all birthdays
* Insurance policies contact list
* Medical and Health insurance contact sheet
* A list of the most important friends and family contacts.  I keep all in an address book, but these are more for emergency purposes.

4. Cleaning-
* Daily, weekly and deep cleaning monthly cleaning lists

5. Blogging-
* Calendar printout
* Blogging recording so I can jot any ideas down of what I wanted to blog about!

6. School-
* A copy of the school schedule
* Important teacher/school info sheet (with phone numbers, emails, and bus info)

7. Ways to play-
* I found this cute monthly "way to play" printable a ways back on pinterest (where else??) and thought it would be a cute addition to my binder, for when I run out of ideas of crap to do with the peas.

Other sections that you may want to include would be:
- A printable calendar where you can record important appts and things, if you don't already have a planner.
- A meal planning schedule.  I print out a calendar every month and write out what we are having for supper and tack it on my board, but it could go in here as well.
- More in-depth medical records.  After having three kids with lots of appts, I made a huge binder solely devoted to medical information.  This is where I keep track of our Flex Spending transactions, keep receipts and all copies of papers we get.  This info gets filed at the end of the year when we do our taxes and I start fresh again the next year.  I wanted to keep this separate, since mine is just so dense as it is.
- A section for your pets info, if you take your animals to vet more often than I do ;)

I am toying with the idea of making a couponing section where I can track my savings and also a section for planning freezer meals, which is something I would like to work on more.  I haven't gotten that far yet, though.

So there you have it.  My Thomas Family Home Management Binder- Yippee!  I love being organized...it makes my heart happy <3

Enjoy!


Here is where I got the majority of my printables from:

The cleaning printables: http://www.sixsistersstuff.com/search/label/Cleaning

Basically everything else, except the ones I have made: http://www.organizinghomelife.com/archives/4275

Some of the blogging organizing papers I like:
 http://www.babble.com/crafts-activities/10-free-blog-planners-to-download/

http://www.homeschoolinmama.com/2012/05/blog-post-organizer-lets-get-started.html

http://www.infarrantlycreative.net/2012/02/free-printable-blogplanner.html

Ways to play: http://lets-explore.net/blog/ways-to-play-monthly-downloads/

2 comments:

Courtney said...

I've always wanted to make one of these too. I should just do it!! Great job.

Jennessa said...

Did you print out everyting in PDF then handwrite everything in? I'd like to type it in :)
p.s. your amazing!

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