This may not seem intuitive, but trust me on this one. For most people, clutter is not only messy, but it has a financial cost. You spend time looking for things, space storing it, lose tax deductions because you don’t have your receipts cataloged or you can’t find the paperwork to mail-in a rebate, require more time for accountants and lawyers to sort out your affairs when something goes wrong, or miss your car warranty, making you pay for repairs costs out of pocket. There is an enormous financial cost to being disorganized.
- Open a set of 26 hanging files, with a tab on each one marked for each letter of the alphabet, A-Z.
- Every time you spend money, fill out a cover sheet, stable it to a copy of the receipt along with the original, and file it by the vendor name in the appropriate file. If you spent $97.52 at Wal-Mart, you would highlight the tax deductible items on the copy (some thermal receipts will cause the lettering to disappear if you mark the document), and file it under “W”. At the end of the year, it becomes effortless to track your expenses and turn your files over for tax preparation.
- Throw out the stuff you don’t use. Seriously. Your life will feel cleaner once it’s gone.
- If you have sufficient assets for it to make financial sense, consider consolidating your entire financial life with a single firm. Many banks now have total-wealth services that include checking, saving, money market, brokerage, insurance, home mortgages and equity lines of credit, college funding, credit card, estate planning, and retirement services. At Wachovia, these are under the Command Asset program, at UBS (the United Bank of Switzerland), they are the Resource Management Account, at Wells Fargo they marketed as the Portfolio Management Account, just to name a few.
