Continuing with this month’s theme of living like I were to die at the end of the month, I think it is important to try to setup your significant other for success. And this leads me to think about automation and streamlining processes to help them.
Financially there are many things you can automate. You can have automatic payments, automatic savings, and even automatic investing. But you can use free tools such as mint to help track spending spending and growing their net worth when you are gone.
Right now, I do not use mint, but I have in the past. I found a few things I didn’t like about it personally. It would not separate the grocery purchases from the gas station run by the store. Also, being my typical place to shop sells more than just food, it could not distinguish between the items from a single trip between food, household, or any other types of items I would pickup such as gifts. So for myself, I found it to not serve my needs. But for someone just needing to know how their spending is – in general – it is an excellent tool. It can include accounts from most financial institutions, although it could not include all of mine which was another problem I had.
So using a tool such as mint and setting up automatic payments for things like credit cards, student loans, mortgage, water bill, basically everything possible, would ease the burden for when I am gone. Most of that is already on automatic except the credit card payments as I usually just pay off the current balance at the end of month. But also the investing strategy can be on automatic as well. I would setup everything to go towards index funds and all automatic contributions and earnings to reinvest into those funds. I doubt my wife has the interest, at least not currently, to learn about individual stock investing. So this is another area in which I can help make things easier for when I am gone.
What about you, what sort of things would you consider automatizing?
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One thing Ive been considering automating is my investments. There are a few companies that offer some great DRIP (div reinvestment plans) and it would be easy to setup. I may do that in the future as it would help take the emotion out of investing
DRIP is a good idea, I haven’t looked too much into that myself at this point.
Since I handle the bills usually, this is something I’m hoping to get to this month, too. For me, I needed to tackle the crib sleeping issue first so that I could have my hands and time free to tackle other things. But this is important!
I have slowly been making things automatic over time, but I should really do more. There isn’t a reason why credit cards can’t be automatic or other things.
I used to have my bills automated it used to make things so much easier. Also making sure thats saving it automatically put away is great to save up because it leaves hyour account before you can miss it
Yes, automatic saving is important too! That is the great thing about 401(k)’s and I also have $100 a month going over to the brokerage.
Automation is a great way to simplify your finances. I try to automate as much as I can to make it easy from saving to bill payments. It’s less time I have to manage the process. One key step in automating your finances is to check that the system is working. You never want to automate and then just forget about. Also have a list of the items you automate in case something happens you.
That is where tracking or tools like mint are helpful. Although I prefer manual tracking… mint can’t see everything so you don’t want to forget about those ones it can’t access. Not sure on personal capital, haven’t tried that yet.