Many look to January 1 as a prime opportunity to get their finances in order. It is, but a spring cleaning can work just as well because it comes around tax time, when you are already looking over a portion of your financial picture.
Yahoo! Personal Finance has a great short article on how to do a spring cleaning of your personal finances. In addition to the six steps they provide, you can delve much deeper to clean up all the small little annoyances.
- If you are not doing online bill pay, now is the time
- Max out your Roth IRA; remember tax brackets will never be this low again so paying taxes now and investing will prevent a large tax bill in your retirement years
- Confirm you are taking adavantage of all tax deductions and write-offs that you can
- Open an online brokerage account and deposit some money into it. If you do not have one, do not have the knowledge, etc. this will give you a push to learn how to invest.