I pay my bills every Friday afternoon, and I really look forward to it. Here's why.

I don't like to see my money go out the door more than anyone else does, but part of being an adult is paying to live. You have to pay for shelter, food, etc. There's simply no way around it.

So, why not embrace it as a way to better understand your finances and give yourself a feeling of freedom?

Every Friday, I hop on my phone and use my bank's automated system to find out my family's checkbook balance. I'm a little anal here; if I can't balance to the penny each week, I freak. My wife never understands this, as she had a history, before I entered her life, of happiness with being in the general ballpark of the bank's number. Me, I see a few pennies difference as a sign that something has gone horribly wrong that I haven't figured out yet, and soon the other shoe will drop.

So, if the balancing works out, I'm halfway to freedom.

Then I try to pay every bill we have, even if it's not due for a while. I just hate having an unpaid bill in our house. If we have enough money in our account to handle every bill in the pile, it all gets paid that day. That way I go into the weekend with no financial coyote gnawing at my innards.

Of course sometimes you can't pay off all the bills as they come, and this is the cause of stress for a lot of people. But for me, I'd rather pay everything off and have $500 in my account than let those bills sit there while $2500 is in the account. Bills = stress, and I want the stress out the door. When I leave a bill unpaid on a Friday, I think about it all the way until the next Friday (and don't get me started if I go 2 weeks in a row without getting things cleared away).

Some people would say that you should wait until the last second to pay your money instead of paying as soon as the bill arrives. I suppose you could make a case that you might earn a little extra interest on your money over the course of a lifetime by holding off on payment as long as possible. For me, though, the destressification of paying pronto is worth it.

The added benefit to this weekly bill pay is that it forces me to have a close relationship with how much money we have and where it's going. For control freaks like me, that's a huge plus. But I think this style of bill paying would benefit anyone who feels like they have problems managing their money.