The September Financial Reset: 7 Things to Clean Up Before the Holidays

September marks a significant point in the year. Summer is coming to a close, school has started, and routines for the Fall and Winter are beginning again. The end of the year is not that far away. This makes an ideal time to take a fresh look at some things that often get overlooked: the everyday business of managing your money. This is not an investment review, or checking on your retirement plan. This is looking at the bills, accounts, subscriptions, and paperwork that make up your financial life daily.

By spending a few hours now, you can save a lot of time and headaches later. I recently worked with a client to locate some specific types of paperwork. Because there was SO much unorganized paperwork that had to be reviewed, the process took much longer than it needed to.

Here are seven areas to review, with a practical methodology at the end that doesn’t require taking a vacation day to accomplish.

Review Recurring Payments

People tend to notice when a large bill arrives, but the smaller charges can often slip by until they represent a significant expense each month. Start by reviewing your recurring charges. Are you still using everything you are paying for? When a client wanted to switch to a separate credit card for all recurring charges, it provided an opportunity to look at each subscription and decide if we were going to update the card on file to the new one, or determine it wasn’t being used and just cancel it.

Review subscriptions, memberships, streaming services, software, automatic bill payments and charitable contributions to find these recurring payments.

Check Your Bank and Credit Card Statements

Look through these statements particularly for unfamiliar transactions, duplicate charges, and unexpected increases. This can help identify fraud, billing mistakes, changes in services including gradual increases, and those forgotten subscriptions. It is important to realize that recognizing a charge is not the same as remembering why you authorized it in the first place.

Clean Up Your Financial Paperwork

Look through paperwork that you have, but haven’t looked at in a while. This includes investment financial statements, insurance documents, tax records, warranties and purchase receipts, and important correspondence. Are you hanging onto documents longer than necessary just because they piled up? After determining how long to keep them, shred those that don’t need to be kept any longer. My long-retired neighbor kept work-related documentation a lot longer than necessary and ended up spending weeks going through old files.

Pick one place for important financial documents and make sure you can quickly locate the information you would need if a bill, account or financial question suddenly required attention.

Update Your Financial Contact Information

For each of your accounts, make sure there is up-to-date information for the mailing address, phone number, email, emergency contacts or beneficiary contacts, and trusted contacts.

This is to avoid having statements going to old addresses and fraud alerts going to old phone numbers.

In addition, make sure that you update this information in a document given to family members or friends who would help you out in an emergency. They need to have current information in order to contact the financial institutions who can also assist.

Look for Financial “Loose Ends”

Financial clutter doesn’t always look like piles of paper. Sometimes it looks more like unfinished tasks. These could be an unused credit card still open, not having a freeze in place on your credit reports, an in-progress insurance claim, an unresolved billing issue, a forgotten refund or an account that should be closed. If not dealt with, those unfinished tasks tend to turn permanent.

My clients like the to-do list that we keep. We pick items to work on each visit. It keeps the unfinished items on the radar so that they get completed.

Create a “What If” Folder

If you couldn’t manage your finances for a month, would someone else know what to do? For my clients, I’m often the “someone else. ” Without a DMM, it is important that information is documented for someone else to follow. A “what if” folder can make life much easier for someone who has to take over quickly.

Information that should be in that folder includes a list of financial institutions, recurring bills, insurance information, key contacts, a list of where to find important documents, and instructions for accessing information.

A Practical Methodology: The 30-Minute Reset

Trying to do all seven of these reset tasks can feel overwhelming. Instead of tackling the project all at once, break it into a 30-minute reset.

1. 10 minutes – Review bank and credit card transactions for the past month
2. 10 minutes – Review recurring and automatic payments
3. 10 minutes – Deal with one unfinished task or one piece of financial paperwork that needs action

If you need more time, then after 30 minutes, find another time on the calendar to do another half-hour reset. By breaking it up, the tasks can be completed without anything dropping.