Shane Robson-Smith
The Workplace Money Coach
Living a successful financial life requires time, organization, practice and the creation of systems that make it easy. Here are a handful of ways to keep your financial life in order so that managing your money will feel like less of a chore.
Budgeting System
On pay day, use a legal pad or Excel spreadsheet to plan out your spending over the next two weeks to make sure you can get through the pay period without running out of money. Planning your spending in advance will help you to understand your limitations so you can avoid situations that will cause you to blow your budget.
Paying Bills
The most hands-off way to pay your bills is to have them on auto-pay each month. But for those of you that like a little more control over when you make your bill payments, I would recommend using the “Prism” smart phone app. This is a free bill-paying app that sends you reminders for when your bills are due and allows you to pay the bill directly from the app by connecting your bank accounts.
Paying Off Debt
If you have consumer debt that you would like to pay off, the most powerful tool that I have discovered to keep you organized, focused and motivated to stick with your plan is PowerPay.org. This is a free program that allows you to input all your debt information and will create a pay-off plan and time-line for getting out of debt. My favorite feature on the program is that you can use it to recalculate what affect making extra monthly payments toward your debt will have on the length of time it will take you to be debt-free.
Financial Documents
It is imperative that we keep sensitive financial documents in one, secure place so that they are easy to locate when we need them but also safe from flooding and fire. I recommend a fireproof box or small safe that can be purchased at any big box store or office supply store. Make sure you remember where you put your key or the code to your safe and give the code or a duplicate key to a trusted friend or family member as a back-up. In our box, we keep our wills, trust, home mortgage information, investment account information, insurance policies, car titles, two-years’ worth of tax documents, passports and a copy of important online passwords so that in the chaos of an emergency, we can access the financial information we need quickly.
