The beginning of February is the usually the turning point for me from a mental standpoint, as far as mentally moving on from Winter into Spring. Despite the two feet of snow we saw this last weekend, I’ve found myself looking forward to the sense of renewal that the Spring brings.
And part of that sense of renewal is a refreshing of my financial situation. As we move closer to the Spring, I’ve found myself making a list of things I want to do in the coming months.
- Move to completely online bill pay, as much as possible – This is a no-brainer for me. We’ll save on stamps and envelopes, obviously, but we’ll also enjoy the convenience of having our bills paid automatically. Technology should make our lives easier, and having our bank automatically issue our checks will allow us to focus our efforts on other, more important tasks.
- Start automatically contributing money to an investment account – This is typically a good idea, but one I haven’t gotten on board with yet. Usually, I like the save up a sum of money, deposit it all at once and make my investment. Unfortunately, this can lead to lulls in my investing, like the one I currently find myself in. Setting this up will help me invest on a more regular basis.
- Review my 401(k) holdings – I usually do this at the beginning of the year, but I let it slip this year. I simply need to make sure that my goals are aligned with my 401(k) investments
- Do my taxes – I have almost all my tax information ready to go, but I haven’t found the time to do it yet. Although this is more of a “need” than a “want”, I need to get on this and take care of it as soon as possible.
- Streamline my existence, a.k.a. sell my crap on eBay – My wife and I somehow have acquired more and more stuff. We need to do some purging. What we don’t donate we need to sell on eBay. I’m not expecting a huge financial boon from doing this, but we could end up with some pocket change.
Readers, do you have any Spring-cleaning goals as Winter starts to (hopefully) fade?
Michael
For the spring, my goal is to not have any overdraft fees on my bank account. BB&T charges me 35 bucks per overdraft fee, so I need to change the behavior that leads to those fees.