When times are good, you don’t feel the impact of being a bit loose with your finances.
The Chicago Fed released their Advance Retail Trade Summary in June and it showed that consumer spending fell 1.3% in May, when adjusted for inflation. Americans are spending less. We’re tightening our belts.
This is a pretty big deal. You’ll see some months with negative values but 1.3% is a sizable drop. February 2023 showed a -1.16% fall while we were dealing with inflation in the 5-6% range and two banks failed (Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank). No other month exceeded -1%.
It doesn’t predict a recession but now’s a good time to review your finances and ensure you aren’t letting money leave your wallet for no reason.
Here are seven ways you can tighten up your finances:
Table of Contents
1. Make Your Savings High Yield
If your bank has physical locations, your savings account probably pays you 0.01% APY. And they probably require you to have a minimum balance of $500 – $1,500 that earns that insultingly low interest rate. That’s money not earning interest.
High yield savings accounts will pay 3-4% APY right now. It won’t change your life but that’s interest you get to put into your pocket. This helps your money grow faster than inflation and changing won’t make your life any harder, riskier, or time consuming.
👉 Check out these high yield savings accounts
Once you do this, make sure you aren’t keeping too much cash in your checking. Ideally, find a bank with a high yield savings account and free overdraft protection into a good checking account too. This way you can keep the minimum in your checking and the bank will transfer funds as needed.
2. Simplify Your Accounts
Draw a financial map of your finances and start removing accounts that no longer serve a clear purpose. My simplifying your finances, you make it easier to manage and it helps you avoid careless fees.
If you’re short on time, prioritize clear duplicates and bank accounts with minimum balance requirements. Unlike credit cards, closing a bank account has no potential negative impact whatsoever. If you haven’t had a transaction in months, chances are you won’t.
As you close those accounts, transfer those funds into a high yield savings account.
If you want a checklist, here’s a list of financial spring cleaning moves you can knock out.
3. Check MissingMoney.com
If you haven’t done this in the last year, go to MissingMoney.com and see if your state (or any state you’ve lived in) has unclaimed funds in your name. These pop up every once and a while when a company tries to pay you but can’t.
I’ve had people find thousands of dollars. It takes a few minutes.
Click here to set up an annual Google Calendar event.
4. Audit Your Subscriptions
Make sure you’re using all of your subscriptions and cancel the ones where you aren’t getting maximum value. You can always sign up again later!
You can manually review your credit card statements or use a tool like Rocket Money to do it for you. For the subscriptions where I’m on the fence as to its value, I keep a log for a month to see how much I’m truly using it. Then you can calculate your “per use” cost as a quantitative way of comparison.
Or just cut them, see if you actually miss it, and sign back up if you do!
5. Comparison Shop Your Insurance
You should comparison shop all of your recurring expenses but insurance is the best example of this because it’s expensive, you’re billed once a year, and there are a ton of competitors with very similar products.
You want to shop this around at least every 2-3 years.
If you own a home and a car, those two policies should be shopped around at a bare minimum. And when you comparison shop, make sure you bundle policies as well as those result in massive savings.
👉 Use this free tool to comparison shop your car insurance
In addition to shopping around, contact your current insurance company and see if there are discounts you could qualify for but aren’t getting. A simple call could lower your rates, I was able to secure a lower rate simply sending an email:
It can’t hurt!
6. Lock Down Your Identity
With all the data breaches and disclosures, so much of your personal identifying information is available online. You can go to HaveIBeenPwned.com right now, enter your email addresses, and see when they were revealed in a breach.
Review our identity protection guide for what you can do to mitigate the damage from these breaches. If you are short on time, start with this:
- Freeze your credit reports at Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion. When you freeze your report, creditors can’t pull it to determine your creditworthiness so thieves can’t open new lines of credit even if they have all of your information. You can freeze and unfreeze entirely online.
- Register and sign up for mySocialSecurity. If you do it first, someone else can’t do it before you and see even more information about you.
7. Review Your Retirement Accounts
There are two big jobs here:
Ensure your asset allocation right now is in line with your targets. If you want 80% stocks, 20% bonds, double check your allocation matches it. If not, adjust your contributions or rebalance.
The stock market has been very volatile lately and it’s a good time to make sure your investments are actually in the places you want them to be.
I’m not advocating that you react emotionally to the market, just making sure it matches your intent.
Find old accounts and consolidate them. If you have a 401(k) from an old employer, roll it over into your brokerage account. You want to be able to manage them from one place, now is a good time to clean that up and pull them together. A rollover is simple and has no tax implications.
And while you’re at it, review and verify your beneficiaries too.
