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Building Your Long-Term Personal Finance Calendar

Keeping track of your personal finances is vitally important, especially in the current economic climate. With financial matters, your situation can go from stable to troubled very quickly, especially if you don’t make the effort to develop a full awareness of your finances. This article will provide you with a great plan for putting your important financial tasks on a reliable schedule.

Monthly matters come first. In this time frame, one of the greatest dangers you need to watch out for is paperless billing. It’s simply more convenient for many people to handle their finances electronically these days. The problem is that a monthly email somehow seems less important than a letter in your mailbox. It’s easy to neglect your financial statements if they arrive online. You need to break the habit of ignoring these statements if you’ve fallen into that. Every month you have to review the activity on each of your bank and credit card accounts. This means you also need to keep records of your own (or save all of your receipts) in order to verify the accuracy of all the charges that appear on your statements.

On a longer time frame, there are important financial tasks for you to attend to every six months. This is the proper interval for checking your financial service arrangements and doing a little speculative comparison shopping. You should review the rates and policies attached to your ongoing services, such as insurance and credit card accounts, in order to verify that you’re still getting a good deal. When you do this review, use fresh documentation from your companies, not old copies of your agreements. Their policies may have changed. You want to take a quick look at the offers being made by competitors at this time. If you find a better deal out there, you can contact your current company and request a matching discount. They may well be inclined to give you one, especially if you have a long history with the company.

There are two big financial matters you need to attend to annually: your taxes and your credit reports. Filing your taxes is, of course, a legal obligation; you should do your best to treat checking your credit scores the same way. Mistakes on your credit reports can seriously impact your overall financial resources. You should request your free reports from each of the credit reporting bureaus every year and address any erroneous entries you find. Tax time makes an excellent reminder for this process. Make a habit of sending for your reports after you file your taxes.

Finally, a note about scheduling all of these different tasks. Doing your taxes is the least flexible item on this list; you have a deadline for that and a limited amount of time to prepare them before it. You have more leeway with all of your other financial tasks. Put them on a calendar to help you remember them at the appropriate time. Also, try to keep them from lining up. If the 15th of June rolls around and your calendar says it’s time to review your checking account, your credit card statements, agreements, your insurance policy and your mortgage, something will very likely get neglected. Spread your schedule out.

It can take a lot of work to stay abreast of your financial concerns, especially when you don’t have a schedule for doing it. Take this article’s advice into consideration and build yourself a financial calendar. You’ll find it minimizes the effort you have to spend on your finances and greatly improves your overall awareness of your money.

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