Best Results Organizing

Whether it’s that shiny nickel that burns a hole in your Garanimals pocket at age 5 or the wallet overflowing with wrinkled receipts or a hot mess of old abandoned 401(k)s that have never been rebalanced or rolled over, money can be a source of pleasure or pain. This series on organizing your finances is designed to give you some actionable ideas for gaining more control over your money in 2016. Review the first nine strategies in Part 1 and Part 2, and continue with today’s money-organizing tips.

10) Organize yourself out of debt.

“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen [pounds] nineteen [shillings] and six [pence], result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”  ~ Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

It might seem as though getting out of debt would have little to do with organizing — perhaps you think it’s solely a matter of making more money or spending less. In theory, both of those things should help you get out of debt; in reality, humans are irrational. To get ahead on your debt repayment, you’ll need to add a little rationality to your approach:

• Stop paying only the minimums — Recognize that just because your bill tells you that $34 is the minimum you have to pay doesn’t mean that’s what you should pay. The less you pay each month, the more interest you’ll pay over time, and the longer it will take you to pay off your debt. It’s in each lender’s interest for you to pay as little as possible beyond the minimum, because it keeps you indebted (and them in business), and because the minimums are so small, they seem inconsequential, leading you to take on more debt. Obviously, your goal is to pay off all unsecured, revolving debt each month; if you can’t, at least throw as much money at your debt as possible.
• Let your right hand know what the left hand is doing — If you have money in savings or investments earning low interest, but credit card or other debt at high interest, consider applying the former to the latter. If you’re earning less than 1% on $1000 but racking up interest at 13% on $1000 in credit card debt, you are losing money. Of course it’s always important to have a liquid (that is, accessible) financial cushion for emergencies, but letting debt pile up each month while low-earning funds wallow, you may be penny wise but pound foolish. Make sure your savings/investing brain is talking to your debt-payment brain by getting a reality check; use the National Foundation for Credit Counseling “Debt or Invest” calculator to see where your money will best serve you.
• Make sure your head and heart converse  — Being rational is important, but if you’re in a constant struggle against your instincts, it will be hard to stick to a repayment plan. Pull up your most recent statement for every credit card and take note of the interest rates. If you have three credit cards, for example, you might have three different amounts at three different rates. Now that you’re not paying merely the minimum, you might be tempted to take the total amount you’ve earmarked to pay off debt and divide it equally among those three credit cards every month. Not so fast! There are better methods that work, either logically or psychologically, and both have advantages and disadvantages.

The Snowball Method — With this strategy, you pay the minimum on all debts except the smallest, and throw all the rest of your budgeted debt-reduction funds toward paying off that smallest debt. Armed with this bit of success, you’ll rebalance your efforts and take all the money you’d been putting against the smallest balance, and now apply it (plus what you were already applying) to the next-lowest balance, and so on. This method has a psychological reward — by focusing on the smallest debt owed, you’ve got something in your “win” column to motivate you to stay committed to the plan. But it’s not particularly logical — by focusing on balances rather than interest rates, your total debt keeps growing.

The Debt Avalanche Method — Line up your debts by interest rate, pay the minimum toward all but the highest-rate debt, and put all of your available money (salary, birthday money, funds raised from selling your books or your plasma, etc.) toward the highest rate debt. This method is logical, but it lacks the immediate sense of victory of the Snowball Method.

Still not sure how much to put toward your individual debts? There are some great no-cost debt calculators available to help you, including:

Mint — If you’re using Mint as a complete financial dashboard service, its Financial Goals feature is ideal for paying off specific debts — one or many. Once you sync the service with your accounts, you can select which accounts you want to include in your debt payoff goals. Mint will already know your interest rate and minimum payment, and will display how your payoff options will impact interest owed over time.

As you make monthly payments, because Mint will already be tracking your money, the system will display how you’re progressing toward your monthly goal (telling you, for example, that you’ve paid “$73 toward your goal of $200 for the month) and how you’re progressing toward your overall goal.

If you have multiple types of debt, like personal debt, business debt and medical debt, you can create multiple goals and view them separately or on one screen. However, note that the goals element of the dashboard service is only viewable from a browser, not from the Mint app.

Ready for Zero — As with Mint, once you sync all of your accounts, Ready for Zero knows your account details: balance, minimum payment, interest rate, etc., and auto-updates when you make payments, add debt, etc. It has similar sliders for setting your approach to your goals, but Ready for Zero’s app seems to be more seamlessly integrated with the browser version, and overall, offers much more variety of display views and reminders. If visual feedback helps you stay motivated, this is a great option.

Of course, if you’re experiencing crushing debt, organizing your information and game plan is just one aspect of financial recuperation. Debt counseling is an important option, but there are a variety of predatory and/or irresponsible so-called debt counselors out there. Begin your search with the National Foundation for Credit Counseling to find an NFCC-Certified Consumer Credit Counselor.

11) Lower Your Interest Rates

You can’t walk into Target and tell the cashier you’d like a discount on toothpaste, or warn the front desk clerk at your hotel that you’d prefer to pay only one-third the hotel tax. You can’t just ask for better deals! Or can you?

There’s little chance of getting your bank to bump your measly .087% savings account interest rate up to 5%, let alone double-digits. That’s just not how banking works. But credit card interest rates are more complex. Sure, the rate you’re charged is dependent upon your credit history, credit score and earning power, but the credit card industry is highly competitive. If you have an unblemished payment history and have been a solid customer, you can try to request a better interest rate.

First, log into your online account for each lender and see if there are already options for things like changing your payment date, requesting a higher credit limit, or getting a lower interest rate. (Don’t get a higher limit for ego’s sake; you don’t need it.) You may be able to handle this with a few clicks. If not, call your lender, be cheerfully polite, and once you’ve identified yourself with your name, account number and all matter of ridiculous levels of proof, tell the representative something like:

I’ve been a loyal customer of [credit card company], pay my bills on time and have been generally happy, but I’ve been receiving offers in the mail from other credit card companies with lower APRs. To be as financially responsible as possible, I want a lower rate on my card. Before I cancel my card with [your company] and switch, I wanted to see what you could do to help me.

And then shut up. You might get a grumpy rep and a rejection, or you might get good news. Either way, you’re out nothing except your time.

If requesting a change in interest rate from your own lender doesn’t work, you can always initiate a balance transfer, either to one of your other cards or a new credit card, for 0% or a very low rate, but balance transfers come with their own caveats:

• There are fees attached, usually 2-5% of the value of the transfer; this fee is added on top of your transferred debt and is subject to the same interest rates that apply to the transferred amount.
• These are short-term interest reduction periods, usually for 9-18 months; any unpaid debt as of the end of the transfer period will be charged interest at whatever the card’s normal rate might be.
• You should only transfer debt to cards that already have a zero balance, and do not charge new purchases on the card until the transferred debt is paid off. Otherwise, with multiple concurrent interest rates on one card, your progress towards repayment will be muddied.

12) Ask and Ye Shall Receive…Better Deals and Discounts

If you’ve ever seen those long, convoluted blog and Facebook posts about extreme couponing, you may think you don’t have what it takes to lower your costs. However, getting good deals doesn’t have to be complicated. Whether you’re trying to buy something at a lower price or reduce the cost of a service for which you’re already paying, try these options:

Let your fingers do the walking. The next time you’re going to buy something online, stop at your favorite search engine first and type in “[name of store where you’ll be shopping anyway] discount” and you’ll be amazed at the number of coupon code sites that will pop up, including:

Retail Me Not

Savings.com

Coupon Codes

From free shipping to percentage discounts, it often takes no more than a few extra minutes to find a rewarding promotional code to use at checkout.

Ask for a better rate. Using the same kind of script described above for lowering your interest rates, call your phone or cable company, or similar service provider, and explain that you’ve been a loyal customer for [X number of] years, have been offered discounts by other providers, or have seen lower rates and inducements the company has offered to new customers, and ask what can be done to keep you happy.

Ramit Sethi of I Will Teach You To Be Rich walks through how to have these kinds of conversations with confidence.

In 2014, NPR’s This American Life did an interesting segment on the concept of the “Good Guy” discount — and how sometimes, just asking for a price break can work. What could it hurt?

Threaten (politely) to cancel your service. This is the next level up from merely asking. It takes a little more aplomb, and may require you asking to get transferred to the Retention Department, but state your case, reference competitor pricing, and then be quiet. At first, they will inevitably try to up-sell you to services you don’t want or need. But stand your ground and it’s more likely that not that you’ll be offered six months or more of discounted service. I have one client who merely calls to cancel her satellite radio service every time she’s billed and achieves a discount in return for her few minutes of effort; with many of my clients, we set aside a “canceling” session a few times a year to see how many discounts we can get.

David Bach, better known for his Finish Rich financial advice empire, wrote a great book a few years ago called Fight for Your Money: How to Stop Getting Ripped Off and Save a Fortune. It’s a superior resource for developing the skills necessary to master a system that’s gamed in favor of large companies.

Too anxious to talk to reps personally? That’s OK, as you can use the same approach online. You’ll often find that if you go into your online account for an entertainment, dating, or gaming service (e.g., Hulu, Netflix, Match, X-Box Live) and “cancel” your account, you’ll get a pop-up notice offering a discount if you’ll keep your account active. Sometimes, the cancelation will go through, but you’ll receive an email within the day, inducing you to reactivate.

And, of course, you can put any of your newfound windfall toward debt-reduction or savings goals!

Next time, in the final post of this series, we’ll look at ways to organize how you get paid, how to make your spending habits boost your return on investment, and fun options to learn more about mastering your money.

Your money has different personalities. Some just sit there like your college roommate’s freeloading boyfriend, drinking your milk and putting the empty carton back in the fridge. (Y’know, those investments you were talked into, but which have gone nowhere?) And some are delightful surprises, like friends who show up to drag you to the movies when you’ve had a bad day. (Think of that crisp $20 bill you find in your jeans pocket after doing laundry.) But your money won’t organize itself.

In Part 1 of 16 Ways To Organize Your Money In 2016, we looked at accessing and organizing the information others have about you in your credit report and credit score, and what you can do to improve your finances by tracking and making wise decisions about your expenses.

Today, we’ll look at more tips for keeping your money life in order.

6) Organize Your Financial Information

All the paper and digital information you have regarding your finances represents money going out (bills and statements for fixed necessities and variable luxuries) and money coming in (birthday checks from Grandma, your direct-deposit paycheck, investment interest and dividends). To keep control of your finances, to help you prepare your taxes, and to safeguard your financial future, it’s important for this information to be accurate and accessible.

The financial paperwork we receive or create usually breaks down into these sub-categories:

Outgoing Money

When you get a paper bill, you either tear off the stub to mail it back with your payment and keep the remainder, or you pay online and keep the whole statement/invoice. When I help my clients organize their financial information, we start by breaking the paper piles into categories:

• Monthly or periodic household bills (e.g., rent/mortgage, utilities, insurance, etc.)
• Credit cards statements
• Loans (e.g., home equity, auto, college, personal, etc.)
• Medical bills (which may be ad hoc or part of an ongoing payment plan)
• Anything else being paid on a regular or predictable basis (e.g., piano lessons, tuition, personal chef, professional organizer, fitness trainer) for which you wish to keep careful records

In this case, your basket is your financial information filing system. Usually, I advise this approach:

1. Label (and alphabetize) tabbed interior folders within each sub-category. It doesn’t matter if you use generic terms (cable, power, water) or company-specific (Comcast, CityPower, Valley Water Authority) — just be sure to choose labels that reflect how you think. For credit cards, if you have more than one card from any one issuing company, you may want to put the last four digits of the card number on the label (Discover-1234, Amex-9876), just to help you file quickly. If your system is complicated, you’ll find excuses not to use it. Stay simple.
   Group related sub-categories in hanging files in a filing cabinet, milk-style file crate, or desktop file box.
2. File the backlog in reverse-chronological order.
3. File paper bills as you pay them.

Alternatives to file folders are three-ring binders and accordion folders. However, binders require three-hole punching of papers, and each additional step leads people to procrastinate. Accordion folders can work for college students and those with very few expenses, but a system you can expand as your financial complexity increases will be easier to maintain.

If you get all your bills and statements digitally, there’s no need to print them out; just set up a new behavioral system to acquire the information, label it, and store it.

You can manually download each statement, or use FileThis, an app/service which, once linked to your account, fetches your online statements and bills so you can pay them and store them as you see fit. Let everything live in the FileThis Cloud, on your computer, or in Evernote, Box, Dropbox or Google Drive. (FileThis ranges from free to $5/month, depending on your needs.)

To create a uniform digital system for labeling (for example, bill name and date, like Verizon-2016-1). Some people prefer to keep all of the digital invoices in one online folder and use search to find what they want; others (like Paper Doll) prefer a folder hierarchy system that matches the one described above for paper.

Finally, while some people refute the idea of maintaining bills once they’ve been paid, I suggest it for a couple of reasons. First, many companies only provide access to a limit period of billing, sometimes only a year or six months, making it difficult to source errors or track information. Second, for those who tend to be disorganized with their finances, a tangible (paper) system yields a greater sense of control.

Incoming Money

Incoming revenue information may involve pay stubs from employment, alimony or child support payments received, Social Security income, disability payments, IRA disbursements, personal loan repayments (to you), lottery winnings, and stock dividends (if not part of a dividend reinvestment plan). If you’re regularly getting money from any source, or have gotten a large lump sum for something other than employment, make a folder (or folders) to maintain records until tax time.

Transitional Money

The above categories talk about what you are doing to your money, but others show what your money is doing, with or without you. Bank statements for checking, savings, and trusts represent collections of funds in transition. They may accrue interest or have fees associated with them, so take time each month to make sure these accounts reflect what you think they should.

Brokerage statements contain investment information. Sort these by investment type: retirement, college savings, goal-related (like a vacation fund), first, and further sub-categorize (and alphabetize) by company or specific investment. So, in the Retirement hanging folder, you might have interior folders for your 401(k), an old 403(b) that remains in place, IRAs with Fidelity or Vanguard, and so on. Each account should have its own folder.

Simulated Money

Some of your records represent money that’s not real yet. These files might include quarterly or annual statements reflecting either regular or atypical benefit plans for your job, such as if you’re vested in an employee stock ownership plan. If you’re not particularly active in managing this information, maintaining it in digital form will keep you from getting overwhelmed.

You can also have a folder in this section for gift certificates, gift cards and store credits so you can keep track of the money value owed to you. If you prefer to keep them portable, a Card Cubby is a nice alternative to mixing them into your financial filing.

Keep stock certificates, bearer bonds, or other papers of significant value in your safe deposit box or fire-proof safe.

7) Create Tax Prep Folders (for the tax year just ended and for the one to come)

Depending on your financial situation, one folder per year might suffice; if your financial life is complex, you might want a handful of folders for each year’s incoming tax forms, charitable donation receipts, medical expense annual summaries from your insurance company, etc. Create a safe place for incoming papers to land and you’ll be ahead of the game.

Any day now, you’ll start receiving official-looking forms (1098s to indicate interest income you’ve paid on certain loans, 1099s to show interest, dividends, and other payments to you, W2s from employers, etc.) to help you prepare your taxes for last year. To get an idea of the forms to expect, these tax-related Paper Doll posts will walk you through it:

Taxing Conversations: Organizing the Essentials & a New Tax Tool

Taxing Conversations (Part 2): Organizing Fun With Forms

Taxing Conversations (Part 3): Form-Free Organizing

Securing these documents (plus any items that pop up when you’re following the steps in #6, above) will make tax time run much more smoothly, whether you file on your own or use a preparer.

8) Organize a (Socially) Secure Future

Cleaning up your credit history will organize your past; getting a handle on your expenses, financial paperwork, and taxes will take the wobble out of your financial present. But what about your future? Banking (if you’ll pardon the pun) on Powerball isn’t going to do it.

There are numerous ways for minimizing taxes and maximizing your odds for a financially secure future, and if you don’t have one or more of the alphabet soup of IRAs, 401(k)s or 403(b)s, you should be talking to a financial advisor about how to get started. But whatever your retirement plan, there’s one program in which you’re probably already participating (unless you work for the railroads): Social Security.

Start by signing up for your online Social Security account, as I’ve been pestering you about since Paper Doll Makes a Statement: The Social (Security) Network.

If you haven’t yet signed up yet, go to the my Social Security website and click on Create An Account. Once you create your account, you’ll be able to track your earnings and verify that they’ve been properly reported (by you and/or your employer), and get estimates of your future benefits. If you’re already receiving benefits, accessing your account enables you to obtain a letter with proof of benefits (often needed for legal and financial purposes), change your address and direct deposit payment information, and manage your benefits.

If you have already set up your account, change your password! The Social Security Administration actually makes you do what you’re already supposed to do — update your password every six months. If you haven’t, it’ll prompt you to do so when you log in.

Speaking of Social Security, take your card out of your wallet or purse — you shouldn’t be carrying it around with you.

As we talked about in What’s In Your Wallet (That Shouldn’t Be)?, in the wrong hands, your Social Security card is an invitation to identity theft and financial fraud. Memorize your number for when you have to unexpectedly fill in forms. (Really, it’s like a phone number, just nine digits.) Put the actual card in your VIP (very important paper) file system or in your fireproof safe, and only pull it out when you need it.

Can’t find your Social Security Card? Report it, especially if you think you’ve been the victim of identity theft, and then replace it.

9) Save for More Than Retirement: Cheating the Obstacles to Willpower

I know, I know. Saving isn’t sexy. But a beach vacation is. And not having to go into credit card debt to pay for next year’s Christmas presents is an idea that gets the blood flowing. But saving is difficult. Usually, in order to save money, you have to use up all your reserves of willpower to keep from spending it in the first place.

What’s willpower, really? Psychologists have defined it as the ability to delay gratification, resisting short-term temptations in order to meet long-term goals. But the more you delay gratification, the more worn-down and put-upon you can feel.

So, why not do an end-run around willpower? Automate! No, you don’t need to be a robot; you just need to take the ongoing decision-making (to put money aside) out of the equation. Make the decision once and be done with it.

Remember last time, in step #5, you audited your expenses and figured out what bills you could lower? Let’s say you lowered your monthly entertainment expenses by $18 and your phone/communication bills by $11, and maybe eliminated a few other ongoing items by about $15 a month. On their own, that may seem a pittance, but that’s $44 every month. Set up an automatic transfer from your checking to your savings account for $11 per week.

Of course, even if you haven’t identified ways to pare down your spending, as long as you’re not at risk of falling into the red, having small amounts automatically transferred to savings on a regular basis is a way to improve your savings rate without feeling you’re being denied life’s pleasures.

There are other automated savings options. Bank of America’s Keep the Change Program helps its customers save by rounding up each debit card purchase to the nearest dollar, and sequestering that extra money in savings but allowing you to track the movement of money via online banking. For example:

Prefer a little more tech support? The Digit web service works similarly. Once you link Digit to your checking account, it analyzes your spending patterns, predicts your cash flow, and transfers small but varying amounts of your money to your Digit account in an FDIC-insured bank.

You won’t earn interest, but whenever you want your money, just text Digit, and the money can be transferred back to you, so you could wait until you reach a benchmark amount, like $500, and then transfer that to savings.

Digit sends one text each day to let you know your new checking account balance; it can also text you how much your bank balance has changed over the prior two days, and can list all your debits from the prior day. The more you use it, Digit not only helps you save, but also gain more awareness of your spending habits. Isn’t that organized?!

Still to come in this series: organizing to get out of debt, streamline getting paid, using technology to achieve your financial goals, and more!