5 Ways to Spring Clean Your Household Finances

By Gina Stahl on May 13, 2022

We officially rang in the first day of spring on the Vernal Equinox on March 20^th. Spring is a great time to refresh and recalibrate your life, but this doesn’t have to be limited to your home. Your finances can use a good spring cleaning, too!

Getting organized and clearing clutter can help you stay on track for achieving your personal and financial goals. Here are five ways to launch your financial spring cleaning:

1. Revisit Your Goals

Did you make plans after the New Year to finally rein in your spending or pay off some lingering credit card debt? If so, you’re not alone. According to a WalletHub survey, 97 million people made a financial resolution in 2022.

Of those people, most pledged to save more, with nearly a third of Americans saying this was important to them. However, only 42% of Americans from the same survey expect to keep their resolution for an entire year.³ Clearly there’s a disconnect here.

So what should you do? We recommend you take time to revisit your financial goals, even if you didn’t actually make any New Year’s resolutions. A lot can change in a few months, so check to see where you stand financially. 

It’s also a good idea to categorize your goals into timeframes. Is this something you can reasonably accomplish in the next 12 months? These are your short-term goals. Goals that require more complex planning or take longer than a year to accomplish should be included with your long-term goals.

Once you have your goals sorted, you should focus on accountability. If you find that you’re struggling to hold yourself accountable, try asking a friend or family member to check in with you regularly. Or create a monthly calendar appointment to check in on your progress. Creating a plan can also be helpful. It may also be easier to tackle your goals by breaking them down into smaller, more manageable tasks. If you’re trying to decrease your spending, you could start by implementing no spend days or limit the amount you spend on things like eating out.

As you go through life, you’ll want to continue to revisit your goals to make sure that they’re aligning with your needs and values. Financial advisors are a great resource to help you review your current status and help you get where you want to be.

2. Passwords

As our lives become more intertwined with the Internet, we become more at risk that our personal information will be compromised. This is even more true as many of us have spent some time during the past two years working outside of the office. Remote work increases our risk.

Now is the time to assess how you use passwords. If you’re like most people, you have a few go-to passwords that are easy for you to remember. In fact, according to a survey of PCMag readers, 70% of respondents admitted to using the same password for more than one site.²

Hackers count on us taking the easy way out. So if you’re still using ‘123456’ (or some variation of this) as your go-to, you may want to reconsider your passwords.

The easiest way to protect yourself online is by choosing complex passwords – meaning a combination of at least ten letters, numbers, and special characters. Ideally, you should be using a different password for every website. However, this is most important for sites where you have your financial information or other sensitive data saved.

You may be thinking right now that this seems like a lot of work. After all, anyone who spends even a small amount of time on the Internet will know that every website seems to want you to set up an account, even if you’re not buying anything. This can quickly get out of hand if you’re trying to manage all of these passwords on your own. A password manager can make your life much easier. They can generate new passwords, store, and autofill them for you. All you’ll need to remember is the master password that you use to set it up!

Once you beef up the security of your passwords, you can double your protection through two-factor authentication (2FA). Think of it like wearing sunscreen when it’s cloudy outside. You may believe that you’re already protected, but just like UV rays can penetrate the clouds and harm your skin, hackers can find ways to get through your passwords. Having 2FA set up can prove to be an essential second layer of protection.

3. Organize Your Paperwork

A Consumer Reports National Research Center report found that one in four Americans have either lost or forgotten a financial document and only 40% could locate important documents if needed.⁵

As you get older and experience big life events like having a baby, getting married, or starting a business, you’ll accumulate an increasingly larger trove of important documents. How you store them depends on your personal preferences and lifestyle, but having a strategy is crucial.

If you live in a small apartment with limited storage, it doesn’t make sense to have a big filing cabinet taking up valuable space. A similar argument can be made if you move frequently. Do you really want to lug around a trove of documents and risk losing them?

Of course, there are some documents that you have to keep physical copies of like birth certificates, marriage licenses, passports, wills, etc. For these, we recommend storing them in a safe deposit box or investing in a fireproof safe to keep them safe from theft or damage.

Other documents can be scanned and saved digitally in a cloud file storing system like Box, Dropbox, or Google Drive. You can still save the paper copies if preferred. As long as you’re saving official documents or anything that has been notarized, it’s up to you whether or not to keep the rest of your documents in paper form. Any sensitive documents you don’t want to keep physical copies of should be shredded for your security. Your financial advisor may offer document shredding as a complimentary service!  

After you create your filing system, it’s important to regularly maintain it. Once a month, scan all incoming documents, save them in the appropriate folder and shred them. This system will help you stay on top of everything while also allowing you to rid your home of clutter.

4. Review Bills to Find Ways to Save

How often do you go through your recurring expenses? You may be wasting money on things you don’t need. Take some time to go through your monthly bank statement and see if you can identify some unnecessary expenses.

Maybe you have a subscription to a streaming service that you started to watch for one show and then forgot about. Determine if these subscriptions are useful, and if not – get rid of them.

You can also downsize the financial investments that you make for things like your monthly car wash package. For example, you could try washing your car at home in the summer or even choosing a cheaper package and washing it less. Everyone’s situation is different.

There may be expenses that you consider essential and that’s fine! However, if you’re committed to saving money, you’ll may need to make some compromises. This doesn’t necessarily mean you need to make a drastic change to your lifestyle. Small, incremental changes can be impactful to your budget, too!

There are also ways to save that don’t involve cutting out things you enjoy. You could take up couponing – either physically cutting them out or even finding them online. When searching for deals on the Internet though, you’ll always want to remain aware of potential scams. Anything that seems too good to be true in all likelihood probably is.

Another option is to shop around for service providers, especially if you haven’t done so recently. In many industries (such as cable or electricity for example) the quality isn’t much different from company to company. If you can shave off a few hundred dollars every month without sacrificing anything aside from your time, it’s certainly something to consider.

5. Unsubscribe and Unfollow

Social media, while a fun way to pass time, can be a big source of spending outside of your budget. Visa recently released a survey that found that a quarter of online purchases were made following an interaction with social media.

Now, this doesn’t mean you need to deactivate your favorite social media account. However, consider unfollowing brands for a few weeks, especially ones that you interact with the most. Remember you can always follow them again if you find that you’re really missing hearing about the latest deals.

Another method is to implement a 24-hour rule to see if you really want that new speaker you saw on an Instagram ad or if your old one works just fine. This can help cut down on your impulse purchases while still allowing you to treat yourself to something nice when you want to.

Another way you can cut down on impulse spending while ridding yourself of clutter is going through your email inboxes. For some of us, the constant inundation of emails can be stressful. Cut down on your email load by unsubscribing to lists that are totally irrelevant. For those that you don’t want to completely opt-out of, you typically can change the settings to weekly or monthly in lieu of daily emails.

Use folders and labels categorize your emails so you can easily see which ones are critical and which can be put off or deleted altogether. Nothing makes an inbox more unmanageable than having hundreds or thousands of emails going to one giant inbox with no way of seeing which are important.

Look into what tools your email provider offers to help you stay organizer. Gmail automatically sorts your emails into folders while Apple has smart inboxes that allow you to see only messages received that day or based on pre-configurated criteria.

Ridding yourself of a cluttered inbox can help you save time and avoid unnecessary temptation. You’ll also lower the chances of important communications getting buried.

This process will also make your daily inbox more manageable. You could be missing important information because it’s getting buried by a barrage of junk mail. Even if you decide that a certain sender is important, you may be able to update the frequency of the emails – opting instead for weekly instead of daily emails.

Oftentimes we’re so busy with the day-to-day minutia that we don’t take the time to do the small things that help our lives run smoothly. This spring, block out a few hours and tackle these spring cleaning items. You may find that it makes your days feel lighter and brighter.  

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