ooh, be careful. While I agree with "Automatic Millionaire" on most points, you still have to "worry if you have money for this or that."
For instance, upping your 401(k) is good! Good for you! But, you will have less in your paycheck, and if you keep spending like you did before, you will overdraw your checking account.
Putting your bills on automatic payment is good too...IF you keep enough money in the account. Just because it is automatically scheduled doesn't mean that you can forget to make sure there is enough money in there.
I've gradually come to pay most things automatically. My 401(k) comes out automatically from my paycheck. My mortgage, student loan, 0% interest credit card, insurance, investments, anything that is the exact same every month, comes out automatically. Other variable bills, like electric, water, gas, etc, I pay every month, so I can monitor how much I am using. But I had a hard time with this until I split my "bill" money up from my "spending" money.
Here's how I do it. I have two checking accounts. I have my paycheck split up into two chunks of money...one chunk goes to the bill account. The automatic things and the variable things I mentioned above come out of here. I have it budgetted until next February right now...I took my highest total I've gotten from each bill in the previous year and budgetted for that in this bucket. If the bill for this month is less than what I budgetted for, the difference goes to savings.
The other chunk of money goes into my "spending" checking account. I buy gas, food and other misc stuff from here, and I can keep track of what I have left for the pay period easier. If, at the end of the payperiod, I have money left over from here, I transfer that to my savings. So, I am kinda forcing myself to live paycheck to paycheck, even though I have money left over after (almost) every paycheck.
When I tried to do the automatic thing from the same account as the misc spending thing, I couldn't keep track. Others might be able to, but I couldn't. But splitting it up has really helped my peace of mind, and you are right...it is much easier to have so much automatic.
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