A brown envelope marked ‘HMRC’ lands on your doormat.
Do you open it straight away and deal with the contents or do you put it with the pile of other papers that you have accumulated?
If you had to get hold of your home contents insurance policy in order to make a claim, would you know exactly where it was?
If you needed to produce your birth or marriage certificates or get hold of your passport, how easily could you do that?
What about your Premium Bond certificates or your Personal Pension Plan policy document?
Are you organised in respect of your important financial papers or are they an accumulated mess in a kitchen drawer somewhere?
Many people could do with a complete review of the way they handle and store financial papers. Perhaps a good start would be to at east keep them all in one place, a secure box kept in a place where anyone who might need to access them would know where to find them.
Getting into the habit of opening envelopes as soon as the arrive and dealing with them, even if they contain potentially negative news like a tax bill for example, means that you can keep control of your financial affairs.
After all the adage about “never putting off ‘til tomorrow what you can do today” is an important one to remember when it comes to dealing with your financial affairs.
Getting your paperwork organised also makes planning for the future easier to do.
Having all the important financial data about your assets and liabilities, income and expenditure in an easily accessible place means you can see exactly what you have, and in the case of debt, exactly what you don’t have.
Getting all your paperwork together and also having spreadsheets on your computer is a great start in planning your financial future. It means you can answer questions with a greater degree of certainty.
How much do I have in my emergency fund? What schedule do I have to pay off loans? How much do I have in my pension fund? What financial protection would my family have in the event of my death or me not being able to work through illness or disability?
Getting your paperwork together is a bedrock of good money management and good financial planning.
Photo credit: Flickr/jessica mullen
