You probably have heard of, and likely have done spring cleaning in your home before. What is less common is
financial spring cleaning. This is a great opportunity to get your finances in order, and as a bonus, it corresponds to
income tax time in Canada and so you would have to be looking through some papers in any case. Might as well
jump on that opportunity to do a complete cleaning to start afresh!
A typical financial spring cleaning will include steps like gathering all your documents (bills, mortgage payments,
loans, insurance plans, RSPs, investments, savings, etc.), then coming up with an awesome filing system that makes
sense for you (a file on your desktop, a drawer in your home, an app), to finally go over everything in order to make
sure everything is accurate, up to date and necessary. If its your first financial spring cleaning, you might also want to
order your credit report to make sure everything it good there.
This is the typical financial spring-cleaning that should be done once a year. For bonus points, and extra money-
saving possibilities, here are some bonus tips you could use while doing your financial spring-cleaning.
Tally up your Springrewards
Do you have rewards on your credit cards? Or other type of reward cards (optimum, Air Miles, etc.). Maybe they can
add up to something interesting. Take the time to tally up all your rewards and see if you can apply it to something
you need, thus saving your money, or, if you’ve got extra, you can spend it on something fun!
Revisit your insurance
You may have many different types of insurance policies: house, car, invalidity, life, salary-protection, etc. Take a
look at them. Make sure that they correspond to what you need, but also that you are paying a competitive price.
You would be surprised at how much money you can sometimes save by shopping around.
Evaluate your debt load
If you’ve already done the first steps of your financial spring-cleaning, you’ve gathered all your bills, debts, payments. Take a little extra time to evaluate how much you owe and where. You may want to use that opportunity to transfer high interest debt into a lower fee loan. This will allow you to be more conscious of your situation, as well as to save money on interest rate fees.
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