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Home › Articles › General Family Finance › Money Management Shortcuts

Money Management Shortcuts

5 Steps to Help Busy Parents Stay on Top of Their Finances

By Cara J. Stevens

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For filing and easy statement access, reserve one binder just for your investments. When the quarterly statements come in, file the most current statement in the front, so you can compare the incoming statement to the prior one. At year's end, you can shred the other three documents and keep only the year-end statements.

Need some added incentive to get organized? When you're in control of your bills and paperwork and when your house is not a breeding ground for paper piles, you're setting the best possible example for your children, and that will make them better money managers now and in the years to come. So despite the frazzled brain, if you can just take the first step toward getting organized, the rest is low-maintenance, smooth sailing.

Pare Down the Paper Piles

Below are some tips to help reduce the amount of paper that ends up sitting around your home:

  • Immediately separate bills from the rest of the mail every day.
  • Keep all your bills in one easily accessible place.
  • Before you file a piece of paper, think, "Will I ever really need to look at this again?" Chances are, the answer is "no."
  • Invest in a paper shredder and shred anything that contains personal information before you toss it.
  • Have the bank hold on to your cancelled checks you can pay a small fee if you need them or you can often view them online.
  • Check your bank and credit card statements online once your transactions post, you can shred most of your receipts.

* Last name withheld to protect privacy.

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