Reducing Time Spent On Managing Finances

June 6th, 2008

I am still reducing my information overload, and identified yet another place where I was wasting time online: Financial stuff.

Not Checking Stocks Every Day

As with website statistics, I was overly obsessed with the daily fluctuations of the stock market. It goes up, it goes down. Yet since I don’t day trade, I wasn’t acting on this information on a regular basis. So why have I been checking this stuff every day? I have no idea. I removed the Dashboard Stock Widget and life is better already.

Moving All Bill Payment Online And Setting Them To Autopay

Quite some time ago, I moved all our accounts so they could be paid online and our paychecks to direct deposit. That alone saved a ton of time that was wasted writing checks by hand. Yet for some reason, I had been squeamish about that last step: changing various monthly bills to automatically pay.

My bill paying process used to be: get an email there’s a bill, login to the website, click a button to pay the bill. Based on Quicken, over the past year, we’ve always had the funds available to pay any bill when it came in, so I finally took the last step and set everything to auto debit.

In the rare case where we don’t have enough money to cover a bill, I have a calender indicating approximately when each bill is due so I can move cash from savings or hold that payment for that month. In addition to utilities being auto debited we also do automatic savings and retirement contributions.

Separate Email Address For All Financial Stuff

Instead of having all emails filter into one account, I set up a new email just for financial stuff. Whenever an email arrives in that particular account I know it’s something financially related that I need to pay attention to. As an added benefit, it’s completely devoid of spam.

Using Cash More Often

This is a bit of a kludge, but I was in the habit of using a credit or debit card for most purchases. Every transaction was something that had to be entered in Quicken, the checkbook, plus I’d spend time checking online to see when it would show up so I could cross off that it cleared. I’ve now decided to carry more cash. One $200 withdraw appears as one transaction which is much easier to keep track of, versus fifty debits for three bucks worth of coffee. Seems to be working so far, and carrying more cash actually makes me more conscious of spending.

Money is a pretty personal thing, but these strategies have been working for us. If anybody has any time-saving, personal finance management strategies of their own, I’m all ears.

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