Tips for climbing envelope mountain - how to open the mail when you've been procrastinating
So many people procrastinate about opening their post. Unfortunately, unlike email, where the passive-aggressive little “unread” number just ticks higher, actual mail takes up space in your home, so eventually you have to deal with it one way or another. (It’s probably a good idea to do something about those emails too, but that’s a problem for another day.)
There are many reasons why unopened envelopes build up. Some people are in debt and are avoiding scary overdue payment letters. Some people are neurodivergent and letter-opening is a chore they tend to avoid. Some people are just busy and keep putting it off until they realise there are several week’s unopened mail and possible something important is lost inside that may need a response.
Now, I have to confess, I have many unhelpful financial habits, but I do generally stay on top of my post and my emails. That said, I’ve helped others with this and I’ve completed tasks I didn’t want to do enough times to have some useful tips.
If you want to tackle your envelope mountain, but the thought feels very overwhelming, here is my gentle guide to getting it done.
Paper can’t bite!
This sounds funny, but our bodies respond to anything we perceive as an emotional threat as if it were a physical threat. Adrenaline and cortisol flooding your system to help you fight or run away will not help you make wise, long term choices about your admin and organisation.
Remind yourself you are not about to fight a crocodile. You are simply dealing with some bits of paper.
What’s more, many people have a tendency to catastrophise about the unknown. There’s a reason that horror movies often don’t show us the monster. What we imagine is so often worse than reality. Once you know what is real, you can deal with it. Until you know, you can’t.
The mountain is actually a molehill.
90% of your post is unnecessary guff and when you open it you’ll find it can go straight in the recycling. It’s either advertising, or duplicates or it’s out of date. There is so much less here to deal with than you expect.
Get a buddy
Do you know anyone else who might have tedious life admin to do? Could you buddy up and do it at the same time? It doesn’t have to be in-person. As long as you’re working at the same time and checking in periodically via a video call or text messages, that will give you a boost. The key is to know that someone else is also tackling their crap at the same time you’re tackling yours. Misery love company and it can help you stay focused and push through when you know someone else is doing the same.
Regulate your nervous system and get in a positive frame of mind
Stretch your shoulders out, jump around a bit, walk around the block, take a few deep breaths and release them slowly. Make a hot drink. Put on some inspiring music. Speak kindly to yourself. You’re not a stupid, lazy, idiot who’s bad at being an adult and can’t even be trusted to open their post. You are an imperfect human like all the other imperfect humans. What’s past is past and what matters are the choices you make now. You are going to open this post because doing so will make your life better and you deserve a better life. It’s time to show yourself love and care by removing this source of stress from your home.
You can open mail and not read it.
Try that! Open your mail and sort it by sender without actually reading the contents.
Take breaks if you need to
Stand up and stretch at intervals. Get a breath of fresh air. It’s ok not to just blast through in a single sitting. (Of course, if you get into a flow or you’re neurodivergent and become hyperfocused, go with it!)
You may want to try the Pomodoro Technique of using a timer to measure out bursts of intense activity (typically 20-25min) with short breaks (3-5min) in between.
You can organise and still not read
Once your post is sorted by sender, sort each sender pile into date order. You still ddont’ have to read the contents.
Start an action list
As you sort the mail you’re going to come across items that need responses or other actions on your part, so it’s a good idea to be ready to make a list of actions as you sort. Grab your favourite notetaking tool whether that’s digital notes, voice notes or old fashioned pen and paper and be ready to capture whatever comes out when you actually begin to read what you’ve been sent.
Have your containers for sorted mail ready
Have a container for the mail you don’t need to keep ready to hand. You may have a shredder, in which case have that nearby and emptied ready to go. That said, it’s common to have too much to put through before a domestic shredder will become filled up and overheated. It’s wise to have a sack or two to contain the mail you intend to shred/recycle/throw out.
You should also have a couple of files for the mail you need to keep. One for mail you want to keep but may have no immediate actions like statements or updated legal terms, another for letters that require action. If you don’t have files, large envelopes will do. Even a couple of bulldog clips to keep like items together is better than just plopping them in a pile.
Begin where it’s easiest
Which letters do you feel most neutral about reading? If there are any letters that you think you will enjoy reading, try saving those for last, as a reward. However if there is a sender about which you feel entirely neutral, this are a good place to start.
As you read the most recent letter from this sender, ask yourself if you need to take any action. Do you have to keep the letter? Is it a statement of account, a legal notification or similar? Or is it just marketing or other useless information? If you don’t have to keep it, shred it and/or recycle it straight away. If there’s an action, add the action to the list and file the letter in the action file. If you just need to keep it, pop it in the “to keep” file, ready to be filed properly later.
If there are duplicate letters for the same action, just keep the most recent and discard the rest.
Celebrate the small wins
Celebrate every time you finish a sender pile. Dab. Do a goofy dance. Strut around like Freddie Mercury singing “We will rock you”. Play air guitar. Give yourself a high five. Whatever will make this process feel just a little lighter and give you a moment to recognise all the work you’ve done, do it!
Go at your own pace
If you’d rather blast through everything in one sitting and be done with it all, go for it. If you’d rather break it into blocks and do some today and some another time, that’s good too. If you choose the latter, I’d suggest actually picking a time and putting it in your calendar as half-completed jobs have a tendency to linger if you don’t set a time for them.
Either way, remember to be kind to yourself as you go. You’re doing this because having a pile of unopened post is stressful and you deserve a life free of stress. You deserve to have the information you need to deal with any issues that arise and not be ambushed by them. That is what you are achieving by opening your post. Well done. I’m proud of you.
If you’d like me to help you get rid of your envelope mountain, pop a time into my calendar and we can work out a plan of action to get those papers sorted and gone.
How much richer could you be by this time 2024?
What difference does it really make to upgrade your every day finances? Unless we run the numbers, it’s easy to ignore the changes we could make to how we manage our money. Often these are small actions and the benefits accrue over time, sometimes only after many years.
So, I thought I’d see what I could work out about the difference a few key changes would make in just one year to a typical household in the UK. This was harder than I expected and I had to fudge a few bits here and there. However I think we can get some plausible indicators.
OK, so, an easy one to start off with: cancelling unwanted automated payments. This might be direct debits, standing orders or continuous payment authorities (commonly used for online subscriptions and recurring in-app mobile purchases).
According to NatWest research in 2020 the average wasted on these is £39 a month or £468 a year per household. Coincidentally that’s the same as the cost of signing up to My Year of Action, so if you sign up and we prompt you to take this action, that’s your money back. Everything else is a bonus. Of course, the NatWest number is from before prices started to rise, so it’s probably more now.
What about getting the best buy home insurance instead of just auto-renewing what we’ll assume is a poor deal? At the time of writing, GoCompare reckon they can save at least 51% of their customers £157 a year on a combined policy; Confused.com reckon they can do £163; and Compare the Market reckon they can do £159.
It seems like £160 is a decent ballpark then.
Looking at the same websites for car insurance, a £380 saving seems a realistic figure for this expense.
What about switching a typical balance to a 0% credit card from one charging interest? According to The Money Charity statistics, the average (mean) UK household credit card debt was £2,252 in October 2022. We’ll assume that this is the balance that’s typically carried over each month i.e. that the amount repaid and the additional spending each month are equal and cancel each other out. Apparently, Bank of England data for September 2022 put the average credit card interest rate at 22.2% APR. So shifting that £2,252 to a 0% balance transfer deal saves an estimated £495 if the balance is held at 0% for a whole year. If there’s a 2% fee for transferring, then the saving is £450, which is still nothing to complain about.
How about moving savings from low paying 0.01% AER accounts to a best buy instant access account. Here it gets tricky. I wasted a lot of time trying to get reliable savings figures. The truth is it’s a bit of a minefield because so many households don’t save anything at all that the figures often talk about savings amounts from amongst those who do save. That means the numbers inevitably skew high because savers are on average higher income than non-savers for obvious reasons. If you’re barely making ends meet, you can’t save, certainly not for longer than a few months.
If you look at financial wealth figures that include non-savers, those typically aren’t broken down by product type, so we don’t know how much is held in savings and how much is invested. For example, the median gross household savings in the UK is £12,500 but that includes money invested in shares and other financial assets, so it’s not useful for our purposes. Likewise I found a stat that gave a median amount of £180 per month “saved” per household, but didn’t distinguish between cash savings and investments, so this could be making wildly varying returns from person to person and household to household.
After much trawling around Office of National Statistics surveys, various savings providers and wherever else I could find, the best estimate I could get to was a typical figure of around £5,000 per household in cash savings. If that was being kept in an old instant access savings account of the type often opened automatically with a current account, it could be earnings as little as 0.1% AER or just £5 a year. In which case, moving it to one of the best buy easy access accounts would bring that interest rate up to 3% AER or £150 a year. So that’s a saving of £145 a year.
Shopping around for a better deal on mobile and broadband packages could easily result in savings of £30 a month total, especially if you’re out of contract. That would be £360 a year.
What have we got so far?
£468
£160
£380
£450
£145
£360
£1,963
Cancelling recurring payments
Switching home insurance
Switching car insurance
Transferring a credit card balance (with fee)
Moving savings
Getting deals on mobile and broadband
Grand total
Nearly £2,000 is pretty good going since none of these involves giving up on life’s pleasures. There’s no skipping lattes or declining invitations to brunch on this list. They’re all one and done actions that run in the background of your life just costing less or making you more than they used to do.
The trouble is making the time to actually get these things done.
This is why I created My Year of Action. So you could save your £1,963 and more with just a couple of actions each month that add up to big results. Check it out. I’d love to see you there.
What can a debt adviser do to help?
It’s Debt Awareness Week in the UK, a week aimed at de-stigmatising debt issues and helping people in problem debt get the help they need from an adviser.
One of the reasons we need this week is that people feel terrible about being in debt, but often don’t seek help before things reach a crisis point. This can be because of shame and fear of judgment, but it can also be because they don’t know how an adviser could actually help.
There’s a perception that budgeting is the only permanent way out of debt, as if once you’re in debt your only options are:
a) misery-misery-misery-bankruptcy
b) live on bread and water (also miserable) until everything’s paid off
I’m leaving out consolidation loans here because those aren’t a solution to debts, just a way to change the type of debt. All too often people who consolidate their debts into a loan keep over-spending and end up in worse trouble than they were before.
Before we go any further understand I’m talking about the advisers giving free advice at debt advice charities. I am not talking about fee-charging advisers. While some fee-charging advisers do give good advice, sadly many give biased advice aimed at pushing you to an unsuitable (but profitable) outcome. To find a reliable, free adviser go to one of the organisations listed here.
The thing is that debt advisers are actually legal experts specialising in the debt law. They know about the legal and regulatory frameworks surrounding lending money, enforcing payment of debts and the protections that people in debt have against being driven into unreasonable hardship. They also know the codes of practice lenders claim they stick to and can spot when they’re not doing that and hold them to accountable. That means that they can find solutions that you or I wouldn’t necessarily know about.
Let’s look at a few of those solutions.
Showing you don’t actually owe the money
Sometimes people are worried about a debt that they are not in fact legally responsible for paying. Some examples might be:
spouse’s debts - unless you signed the contract too, your husband or wife’s debts are often their problem. (There are a few exceptions like utilities, Council Tax and TV Licence for a shared home.)
inherited debts - when a person dies their debts must be paid out of the money and assets they leave behind (their estate), but if they don’t leave enough behind to pay off the debts, then the remainder of the debt dies with with person.
debts where the paperwork is incorrect - did you know that if a lender gets their paperwork wrong they forfeit the right to collect the money they lent you? Now you do!
All of these issues are more complex than the few sentences I’ve given you here, but they illustrate the general point. Sometimes you might not need to pay what you think you need to pay and a debt adviser can get the creditors to back off.
2. Getting interest and charges frozen, so it’s easier to repay
Actually you may be able to do this yourself. Instructions for how to go about it are in National Debtline’s How to Deal with Debt Guide. This is an early step in everyone’s debt advice journey. When you’re being drowned in late fees and interest on your interest, stopping that flow is vital.
Typically fees and charges would be paused for three to six months with a review at the end. The aim is to give you time to find a more permanent solution
3. Maximising your income
Many debt advisers are also familiar with the benefits system and know of grant-making charities that can get you money to help with some of your debts. For example there are specialist charities that can help with gas, electricity and water arrears. Helping you find income you didn’t know you could get is a part of a debt advisers job. They are also good at spotting insurances you may be ale to claim against. Or charges you should never have paid that could be reclaimed.
They may also be able to help you cut your costs in ways that would help you get your books better balanced.
4. Negotiating lower repayments
A debt adviser will be able to help you prioritise which debts need to be paid off first, based on the consequences of not paying. Then they can help you develop a repayment plan that is actually affordable while still leaving you money for a frugal but realistic lifestyle. This may mean that some lenders who have been bugging you for more money may actually be low priority and will have to suck it up and accept that you’re only going to give them a token payment of, say, £1 a month for the foreseeable future.
NB this can affect your credit rating, but you shouldn’t let that stop you. It’s usually better to take the hit in the short term and then rebuild, than carry on and miss payments leading to more stress and a worse mess.
5. Writing off all or part of your debt
Sometimes a debt adviser will be able to convince a lender that you will never be able to repay them in full. The creditor might then agree to write off all or part of the debt. If you have a pot of money (eg an insurance pay-out, some savings, the proceeds of selling something valuable etc) your adviser can negotiate with the creditors to share this out fairly between them and ask them to write off whatever’s left over. Since something is better than nothing many lenders will go for this.
Alternatively, the adviser could plead your case that you’ll never be able to pay and it’s costing the creditors more in staff wages trying to chase you than they’ll ever make back. This may convince the creditors to cancel the remaining debt.
Again these solutions will affect your credit record, but, in my opinion, they’re well worth it for the peace of mind. Also lenders are unlikely to accept either of these options unless you’re really struggling and things aren’t likely to get better, for example, if you’ve had to give up work due to an injury or sickness. If that’s your position, I’d suggest prioritising your wellbeing over your credit rating.
6. Suggesting the right formal solution
Sometimes insolvency is the right answer. That might be bankruptcy, an individual voluntary agreement (IVA), or a debt relief order (DRO). I’m not going to go into the difference between these solutions here but suffice to say if a debt adviser suggests one you should consider it carefully. People get scared of formal debt solutions but they’re a protection, not a punishment. It’s unreasonable for you to spend decades paying down debts. If the alternative is a DRO, bankruptcy or an IVA you should consider it.
Each solution has its pros and cons and terms and conditions attached. Read these carefully and make sure you understand what you’re doing and that it really does meet your needs before you sign up.
I hope this helps you understand what a debt adviser could do to help and why it can really help to speak to them as quickly if you’re struggling with debts.
If this post has helped you, have a listen to these two episodes of my podcast, Squanderlust:
Episode 11: Interview Money A + E - I spoke to two former debt advisers about how their own experiences of financial troubles inspired them to help others.
Episode 23: Debt Advice Avoidance - Why do people delay getting advice? We talk about the psychology and give an overview of what happens when you meet with a debt adviser.
If you’re not yet missing payments and you’re pretty sure your debts come from overspending, in other words you think you could pay them back with some lifestyle changes, here’s some inspiration from people who have done just that.