A deep-clean for your finances

Something for everyone in this MSN article from Liz Pulliam Weston:

Spring-clean your finances

She talks about

• The benefits of using personal finance software
• Trimming the number of financial accounts you need to keep track of
• Using online bill payment
• Reviewing your bills to see if there are opportunities to save money
• Checking your credit history and cleaning up any undesirables
• Cashing in on all of those rewards programs you have lying around

These range from relatively small peanuts to near-paradigm shifts in how you go about your finances.

Some comments:

• Use online bill pay, but don't forget about your bills. Changes to terms and conditions happen all the time, as do billing errors. Just because you pay your bill online or even automatically doesn't mean that the bill is correct. In fact, in some cases it's harder to keep on top of the things you're paying for when you pay online. So be sure to watch them carefully.
• If you get personal finance software “add-ons,” try to save yourself a little (or a lot) of time by choosing software that can import relevant information from other software you're buying or already own. That way, you're not hand-entering as much data.
• Keeping on top of your rewards programs is a lot easier if you choose a few good ones and resist the temptation to sign up for others. A lot of rewards programs have expiration dates on the rewards, so it's a lot easier than you might think to hand back your rewards to the company. A low-maintenance one like a rebate credit card (as in the Chase PerfectCardâ„¢ MasterCard®) credits your rebates to next month's bill — nothing else to do or redeem!  Another acid test you can use to see whether a rewards program is worth joining is to estimate the value of the rewards you get.  If you can do just as well with a rewards progam you already have, then there's no reason to join the new one!