Single step personal finance challenge
July 18th, 2008 | by mbhunter |Mrs. Micah has thrown down a single-step personal finance challenge:
Find one step you can take to make your financial system better or more organized.
Oh man, I could take probably about a hundred steps to make my financial system better organized. There should be a lot of motivation for doing this, as being disorganized can cost a lot of money.
My single-step personal finance challenge would be to go paperless.
The influx of financial statements seems to get a bit more involved each year. Some of my financial things like my life insurance come only once a year. Others come once a quarter. But the majority come once a month: well over a dozen statements. (I don’t know off the top of my head; I’m not that organized. Which is of course the point.)
To break this down, I’d:
- go through my financial services one by one,
- get electronic statements enabled, and
- purge my files for that service if I had access to a logn enough history online.
Mose of the financial institutions have been encouraging me for years to go paperless. Maybe this is the time!
(Mrs. Micah told everyone to tag themselves for this challenge, so I’ll just do the same.)
5 Responses to “Single step personal finance challenge”
By Sam on Jul 18, 2008 | Reply
I would probably cut my 5 credit cards and use just one instead. This will make it easier for me to keep track of my expenses.
Sam
Fix My Personal Finance
http://fixmypersonalfinance.com
By Benjamin on Jul 18, 2008 | Reply
I definately need to come up with a better centralized filing system. I’ll get statments in and keep some here and some there. I have a pile of “important” stuff, then I make a pile of “less important” stuff, and finally I have a pile of “least important” stuff.
The sad thing is that it is all still important mail and it all requires my attention so my goal will be to quickly address each item as it comes in the mail and take the appropriate action with it immediately.
I believe it was Trent from TSD that said he trys to only touch his statements once. As soon as he makes the commitment to “read” the mail, he doesn’t stop until all items have been properly dealt with.
By Benjamin on Jul 18, 2008 | Reply
I definately need to come up with a better way to handle my mail. I’ll get statments in and keep some here and some there. I have a pile of “important” stuff, then I make a pile of “less important” stuff, and finally I have a pile of “least important” stuff.
The sad thing is that it is all still important mail and it all requires my attention so my goal will be to quickly address each item as it comes in the mail and take the appropriate action with it immediately.
I believe it was Trent from TSD that said he trys to only touch his statements once. As soon as he makes the commitment to “read” the mail, he doesn’t stop until all items have been properly dealt with.
By Christian Personal Finance on Jul 18, 2008 | Reply
@MBH
I am with you on the paperless thing. I am so sick of getting all the paper statements in the mail. But yet, I still haven’t taken the simple steps to get them stopped… Ok, ok, I will add it to my to-do list
By Ryan McLean on Jul 20, 2008 | Reply
Good on you!
Paper sucks
Email, internet, data all the way
Good luck with this