There are a ton of things I’m supposed to be doing that I’m not doing – organizing personal finances, cleaning the closets, sorting out the photos.
Everything changes this year. This is the year where I finally get everything organized at last, at last.
I am calling this project “grown-up activity workbook”. The idea is to approach all these dreaded tasks in a super non-threatening way. It will be a bunch of worksheets in the style of children’s arts-and-crafts projects – those projects from Blue Peter or Anorak magazine where you make a dream-catcher out of string and crayon and paper plates. You make a flower out of an old egg carton and a stick.
This will be the same thing except for grown-up activities, like assessing your pension options and transferring all your pension holdings from previous workplaces into one consolidated account. I’ll start with super simple instructions. Later I might add in those goofy touches you get in craft books – flower art in the margins and connect-the-dot sidebars.
The first worksheet is about organizing and reviewing your bank statements. In this worksheet, you will save last year’s bank statements on a USB and then write down your balances, income sources and maybe a few selected costs. By the end, you’ll have a nice tidy USB with all your bank statements and an idea of your net wealth. It should take about three hours.
Perhaps, in the process, you can come up with some creative way to improve your finances. Maybe you can move things around or reduce some cost.
I started doing this activity a while back so that I could file my FBAR but I think it’s useful for everybody anyways. I posted something similar last year but I think this one is simpler and better.