Do you spend a good portion of your weekends paying bills and monitoring your finances? While it's important to keep your finances current, it takes a lot of time. To get some of that time back, you can automate your finances.
8 Ways to Automate Your Finances
- Set up direct deposit. If you haven't already done this, ask your employer to automatically deposit your paycheck into your bank account. A lot of times, this will mean that you'll receive your money a bit sooner than you would if you were waiting to deposit a paper check. Don't forget to do this with any smaller sources of income you might have too!
- Set up automatic payments. Do you have regular payments that you know you'll have to make every month? Put those on auto-pilot! Many companies will allow you to set up automatic payments with them. If not, your bank might be able to automatically send a payment at a certain time each month. We use our bank's bill payment service to send tuition and rent payments each month.
- Set up automatic minimum payment on all of your credit cards. Do this even if you don't carry a balance. That way if you forget to make a payment (of if you can't make it because of some type of a crisis), you won't have to worry about late fees.
- Automatically fund your investments. Figure out how much you want to invest each month, and work with your bank or investment company to automatically fund your investment accounts.
- Automatically fund your savings. Just like with investments, you can set up an automatic transfer to your savings. When the transfers happen automatically, they're more likely to actually happen!
- Set up alerts. Want to know if your checking account goes below a certain level? Set up an alert to be notified if that happens. Many banks will send you a text message or an automated call. You can set up alerts for bank accounts, credit cards, and more. I recommend setting up as many alerts as possible to be on the safe side.
- Consider using a password protection service like 1Password or LastPass. That way, you can create more-secure passwords for your accounts, and you don't have to remember them all! If you're using a password protection service, once you're logged into your secure account, your passwords will be filled in for you automatically. It's a huge time saver, and it's a great way to keep your accounts more secure.
- Save when the price drops on your Amazon purchases. Use a service like Paribus to monitor the prices of your Amazon purchases. If a qualified purchase drops in price, you'll get a percentage of that money back, and you don't have to do a thing to make it happen once your free account is set up.
Setting up the automation of your different accounts can take a lot of time, but it will save you a lot of time and energy in the future. Plus, you don't have to worry as much about your accounts being compromised, or forgetting to pay a bill.