goodhousekeeping.com
Carmen Wong Ulrich gives a great plan for getting a handle on your finances in this month’s Good Housekeeping. She calls it a “Two-hour Money Makeover” and God bless the person who can hunker down and take the 2 hours to do it. Between interruptions and lack of willpower, I wouldn’t bet on myself. But I did something similar one month for 10 minutes a day, and it worked really well — made progress, saved money and felt in much more control of where my money was going by the end of the month.
Whether you sit down and do it in one sitting or stretch it out a few minutes at a time for the month, you’ll still reach the finish line. Here are her suggestions, with a few of my own at the end…
- Reevaluate your banking: fees you didn’t know about? lower interest rate than you could get? ATM fees?
- Scour your bills for any “gray charges”: mystery entries you don’t remember
- Assess savings strategies: socking enough away for emergency expenses?
- Retirement savings review: can you increase your savings?
And I’d add…
- Evaluate college savings: See what college will cost; see if you’re on track
- Credit card bonus points: Are you using a credit card where you earn points (without the tradeoff of high interest rates or other fees)
- Consider refinancing mortgage: Are current rates better than yours?
- Document daily spending: in notebook or on a smart phone app; real eye opener
Do you have an easy trick for taking charge of finances?
This is the right blog for anyone who wants to find out about this topic. You realize so much its almost hard to argue with you (not that I actually would want…HaHa). You definitely put a new spin on a topic thats been written about for years. Great stuff, just great!
thanks, karla, i’m glad you’re visiting…