Wise Bread hit the nail with organizing the finances

It's not too often that I read an article and nod my head up and down throughout the whole thing because it makes that much sense.  Wise Bread writer Craig Ford has six tips for organizing finances that are completely spot-on:

• Reduce your total number of financial accounts. Just a few days ago my wife was talking to me about closing a couple of our bank accounts that had seen very little activity recently.  I signed up for one because there was a teaser rate on the account for the first six months.  I signed up for another because there was a fairly substantial bounty for doing so.  But now the money just sits there, almost forgotten, without any real good reason.
• Combine financial accounts into one institution. We got business checking accounts at a local bank a few years ago only because our credit union didn't offer them at the time.  Now that out credit union does, we're looking to transfer them over there.  It's not because of any dissatisfaction we've had with the other bank, but it's nice to go to one place for all of our local banking, business and personal.
• Find an effective financial tracking system. Check.  We're using Quicken to organize for taxes, and beyond.  There's start-up time of course, but once the catch-up work is done it will be far easier to use this tool.
• Establish a good filing system. Financial papers turn into a paper monster without a good filing system.  We're getting better about doing e-statements and with scanning our documents to get them more accessible.
• Keep a regular schedule. Man, this is so true.  The financial grunt work is truly intimidating if it piles up for too long.  (I'm more than a little relieved that it caught up with Craig and his wife, too.  I'm glad I'm not the only one!)  The schedule that worked for him was 15-30 minutes once a week.  I've heard other people say that once a week is about as long as you'd want to go; two weeks is too long for one of my colleagues to go without running through his transactions.  As for tracking and remembering cash transactions, those should probably be written down every day because they get forgotten about very quickly.  (As an update to that post, I did manage to write down most of my cash transactions, but not all of them.  Boo on me.)
• Always have a notebook handy. This advice is good in the general sense as well, but especially for money stuff.  God is in the details, but the devil is in the details that are forgotten about. 🙂