Spring Clean Your Finances
Spring Clean Your Finances: 5 Steps to Get Organized and Refreshed
Spring isn’t just for cleaning out closets and tidying up your home—it’s also the perfect time to refresh your financial life. If your finances feel scattered, disorganized, or stressful to manage, a little financial spring cleaning can help you get back on track.
Here are five steps you can take today to help you declutter your financial life, reduce stress, and help set you and your family up for a more organized, confident future.
1. Clean up your accounts
If you have accounts spread across different banks and institutions, it might be time to consolidate. Keeping a checking account at one bank, a brokerage account at another, and an individual retirement account (IRA) somewhere else can leave you feeling scattered.
Multiple points of contact and underlying strategies can create unnecessary complexity. Even worse, having several accounts that serve the same purpose can cause confusion and make it harder to manage your overall strategy.
Sit down and take a quick look at all of your accounts. Even just having an idea of where your money is can help you feel more organized and informed. Consider consolidating accounts where it makes sense to simplify your financial life and improve your focus.
2. Declutter your debt
Managing multiple loans and credit cards with varying interest rates and due dates can be exhausting—and costly. Debt consolidation might be a smart move. By combining debts into a single loan with a competitive interest rate, you’ll not only save money on interest but also simplify your payments.
A single due date each month is easier to manage and reduces the mental load that comes with juggling several debts at once.
3. Go paperless
Still receiving paper statements? It’s time to go digital! Switching to paperless statements reduces clutter and makes it easier to organize your financial documents. Most financial institutions offer secure online access to your accounts and even digital tools to track spending and savings.
Going paperless isn’t just environmentally friendly—it can make your financial life a lot more efficient. The trees and your decluttered desk both thank you.
4. Plan for taxes
With the tax deadline approaching on April 15, now is the perfect time to assess your tax situation. Take a look at your projected income, retirement contributions, and health savings. Are you taking advantage of tax-efficient strategies?
More importantly, what are “tax-efficient strategies”? They are strategies you can use to reduce your taxable income and, therefore, give less of your money to Uncle Sam. The more money you make, the more helpful tax-efficient strategies become, and there are many things you can do to reduce your taxable income. Examples include things like putting money in a pre-tax 401k instead of a Roth 401k, gifting money, or maxing out your Health Savings Account contributions.
There are many other tax-efficient strategies you can use, but they tend to be a little more complicated and/or technical. If you’re not sure where to start, reach out to us for a tax planning placemat—it’s a simple tool to help you identify tax-saving opportunities, make sure you're asking yourself the right questions, and guide productive conversations with your CPA.
5. Organize your income and expenses
Closets aren’t the only things that need regular organizing. Just like decluttering your home, taking stock of your monthly income and expenses can be eye-opening. Review your budget and spending habits to see where you can cut unnecessary costs and redirect that money toward savings or other goals that are important to you.
Need help getting started? Just reach out and we will send you the financial organizer tool we use with all our new clients. It can help you organize your monthly finances and get a clearer picture of where your money is going and ways it could be working harder for you.
Spring cleaning isn’t just for your home!
None of the above steps are difficult or super time consuming–but each of them can go a long way toward helping you feel more in control and less stressed.
And if you want to simplify your finances even further, or you’re having a hard time motivating yourself to get through the above actions (no shame, it’s a lot!), we hope you’ll reach out. We’re here to help.