Tracking

Are You Tracking Your Finances Properly?

With so many aspects to personal financing these days, from short term loans to mortgages, all of the information around you can be a bit overwhelming. Most people who feel that way usually do because they don’t utilize the full range of tools available at their disposal to simplify their financial lives. There’s a lot that can be done to make your budget easier to keep track of, but it’s up to you to take the initiative and get started with using most of those solutions in the first place.

Online Banking

The simplest thing you can do is to enable online banking on any of your accounts that support it. This will provide you with an immediate overview of your finances, letting you know exactly what’s going in and out at any given moment. In addition, it will allow you to handle some payments more easily as opposed to going to the bank in person.

The only downside to online banking is that it can create some potential security problems if you’re not careful. You should take precautions to secure your account and use all forms of extra security that are provided to you. From 2-factor authentication, to facial recognition and more – modern banks can be quite advanced in this regard. Talk to your bank if you’re not sure where to begin – they will surely have some tips to get you started, and may even already have some recommendations based on your account specifically.

Budget Tracker

A good budget tracker can open up your eyes to some problems in your life that you may not even be aware of. If you’ve never used one before, you’ll be amazed at all the information it provides right at your fingertips. With most budget trackers, you can even go in even more detail, analyzing your trends in specific periods, breaking them down by day, even hour.

This can be very useful when it comes to setting up a long-term budget, as it can show you exactly where you have issues with your finances and will even give you hints on how you can address them. The rest comes down to following up on those tips. Keep in mind that a budget tracker knows only as much as you tell it, so it won’t be able to predict any factors that are related to external accounts and so on.

Do your best to consolidate all relevant information in one place to prevent these types of problems. Many budget trackers come with direct integration with many types of online banking and payment account services, so you just have to do a few clicks to get things set up, and you can then leave it running and forget about it.

Automatic Receipt Scanning

Many people use receipts as part of their budget tracking. They are also useful when you want to ensure that you can return something at a later point. However, keeping all of those receipts can become a nightmare quite fast, even if you have a dedicated binder for them. One of the easiest solutions is to use an automated receipt scanner. Those are commonly available for smartphones these days, and they can go a long way towards making your finances even simpler and more manageable.

With one click of your smartphone, you’ll be able to keep track of every new expense in your budget, and add those receipts to your vault. Later on, when you need to access something, it’s as simple as looking up its name. You don’t have to do any annoying digging through piles of old receipts until you’ve found the one you were looking for. You also won’t have to deal with things like paper degradation, loss, and more. This small tool can be a huge factor in simplifying most people’s lives, and many don’t even realize it.

Centralized Account Tracking

If you have multiple financial accounts, keeping track of them can quickly spiral out of control if you’re careless. This is a common problem for people who keep opening new credit lines, online payment accounts, and so on. On top of making things more complicated, this is also a huge security risk that you can’t underestimate.

There are solutions out there that can keep all your accounts in check from one centralized spot. Those can be a bit difficult to get used to at first, but once you’ve been using something like this for a while, you won’t want to go back to the traditional style of doing things. A centralized account tracker can do a lot to help you keep your information accessible from one place. But it has to be a trusted application properly authorized by all banks you’re connecting it to. Otherwise, it becomes an unnecessary security risk.

Keeping your finances in check is not as hard as most people think. It comes down to following some basic principles, and ensuring that you’re using all tools available that can simplify the process for you. The rest comes down to personal discipline and a little bit of tech savviness. You don’t have to be a computer expert, but you should certainly keep yourself informed enough to be able to recognize quality offers that can benefit you.

Retirement

How to Make Your Retirement Years Better

Preparing for retirement is something that everyone needs to pay attention to from an early age. In some cases, you might be lucky enough to have a job that will set you up on that front. But in other situations, it will be mostly up to you to secure a good financial foundation for your retirement years. It may occasionally take a lot of effort to get there too, and you have to be persistent and keep pushing.

But in the end, this will define the last years of your life. This is not something you should take lightly, and you must make sure to play your cards right if you don’t want to have a very stressful retirement. After all, this is the period in your life when you’re supposed to just relax and enjoy everything you’ve accomplished.

Don’t Trust Your Default Retirement Plan

Many people trust their default retirement plan to carry them through that period of their lives, but that’s often an illusion. Especially in some industries, you can’t expect to be taken care of properly when you retire if you haven’t been putting in enough effort yourself. See how much your company is willing to match on any special retirement plans, and max that out. Don’t put that off either – it’s something that can stack up quite well over time, and it’s a good idea to start out early.

Look into any additional plans that you might have access to as well. Choose carefully, and remember that this is not something you can back out of easily later on if you decide to. That said, if you do enough planning ahead of time, you won’t ever have to make that kind of switch.

Don’t Put Off Planning Until the Last Moment

Don’t make the mistake of postponing this either. This is the number one problem people tend to suffer from in their later years. Sometimes, there might be an improvement to your retirement plan that’s right around the corner, but if you don’t use it early enough, it won’t matter much in the long run. The earlier you start with this planning, the more you’re going to benefit from it in the long run.

Sometimes it might be possible to scout out a better deal at a later stage, but this is mostly down to luck, and you shouldn’t count on it as a factor. You should ideally have your retirement entirely sorted out in the first few months of your career.

Saving Wisely

A good savings account can also go a long way towards a happy retirement. Although you can’t count on savings alone to get you through those years, they can certainly go a long way towards making them better. And if you save wisely, you can live a much better life in that period than most people in the same line of work as you.

There is a reasonable upper limit to saving though, and you should try not to overdo it. At some point, you’re better off spending your money on other things that can provide you with a much stable financial future.

Investments

Which brings us to our next point. Investing is a good idea if you want to retire peacefully and in some cases even early. It’s not a straightforward game that everyone can get into easily, and there’s a certain degree of risk attached to making investments. But if you play your cards right, this can bring you some significant benefits in the long run. A few proper investments can completely set you up for life, and you will not even be thinking of your regular retirement plan at that stage.

Of course, this is not something you should approach recklessly. Be patient, make small and calculated moves, and always keep track of your progress. As long as there’s a visible upwards trend, that’s all that matters. The rest comes down to knowing what to do with that money later on.

Retiring Earlier

And this all brings us to our final point. If you do everything right, and get a dose of luck along the way too, it’s entirely possible that you can retire earlier and live out the rest of your life in luxury. However, this takes a lot of work to accomplish, and it’s not even guaranteed. In some cases you might end up putting a lot of work into nothing if you’re not careful enough.

The bottom line is, no matter how you choose to approach this, you need to have a plan, and you can’t leave this to random chance. Most people that do ultimately end up very dissatisfied with their lives in their later years, wishing that they could go back and change things. But needless to say, at that point it’s far too late to do anything that could impact your situation in any meaningful way.