Review your account statements: Search for unnecessary expenses, extra fees, and fraudulent charges. A thorough review of your spending often reveals significant opportunities to reduce expenses and increase savings and investments. And extra fees — charges that shouldn’t have been made to your accounts — occur more commonly than most people think. If you catch an average of even just $10 a month in fees that you can rightly get refunded, that’s an extra $100+ at the end of the year that you can use to indulge in buying Christmas presents or to reward yourself: take an extra evening out at a nice restaurant, or pay for something fun you want to do on a weekend. Or just treat yourself to buying that item you really want, but that doesn’t quite fit into your regular budget.
Securely file or dispose of financial statements: You want to maintain easy access to those financial documents you can reasonably expect to look at within the coming year; but you don’t want to allow documents you no longer need to build up as “clutter.” If you have digital and paper copies of the same statements, consider shredding the paper copies. Keep in mind that financial documents like tax returns should be kept for a minimum of seven years. Afterwards, shred them to protect yourself from fraud and identity theft.
Review your savings plan: Examine whether you can comfortably commit more money each month to savings and investments. Or if you got a bonus at work or for whatever reason happen to have a little extra money this month, decide on the best place to commit that money: an extra savings deposit or additional deposit to your investment account(s), paying off a credit card or other debt.
Quickly assess whether you stayed on track toward your savings and spending goals since your last review: The aim here is simply an honest assessment, to give yourself a clear idea of how well you’re doing at managing your money and moving toward achieving your financial goals. If you fell short in one area or another, don’t beat yourself up over it. Just make note of areas where you need to improve and write out the steps you’ll take to do better next month.
(Resource: NFEC https://www.financialeducatorscouncil.org/)
