5 Tips for Spring Cleaning Your Finances

Don’t limit spring cleaning to your closets and your garage and the spring sprucing to your shrubs and yard.  Cleaning should extend to your finances as well.  Last Saturday morning in an interview on KARE 11, I discussed 5 tips on how to get your finances in order for 2012. 

 1.    Dust Off Your Old Beneficiary Forms

  - if something happens to you, you will want to make sure that your assets are allocated correctly. Check with your lawyer - if you're recently married or divorced, the forms should be updated.

 2.    Rake in Better Performance

Spring is the time to plant so that you can you can have a good harvest in the Fall.  The same goes for your finances; make sure you have a well-thought out financial plan that ensures you are maximizing your savings for retirement.   Don’t forget that what you’ve planted during the year, you should be actively weeding – or managing and rebalancing your financial portfolio during the year.

 3.    Prune Your Retirement options

Just like pruning our shrubs will produce better growth, .  By making changes now, you can maximize the asset building for the rest of the year.

 4.    Avoid Trimming Your Finances through Over-Taxation

As you do trimming around your yard, remember the government trims your money through taxes.  We could see changes to next year's taxes: there is a new healthcare tax that could affect your family and the Bush tax cuts are set to expire.  Do maintenance with a financial advisor now to make sure you are maximizing your deductions and that the government isn't trimming more than it should be from your finances.

 5.     Deep Clean Your Files

Feel like you’re drowning in papers in your home?  If you are audited, there are some documents you should be holding on to, but there are other financial papers that you can shred. What is okay to trash and what should we hold onto? Here is a sample of some of the rules you will find included in the complete listing found on the website for Secured Retirement Advisors:

1.  Canceled checks with no long-term significance for tax or other purposes can be destroyed after one year. However, canceled checks that support tax returns, such as charitable contributions or tax payments, should be held for at least seven years – long enough to cover the six-year tax assessment period. It’s advised that consumers indefinitely keep any canceled checks and related receipts or documents for a home purchase or sale, renovations or other improvements to owned property and non-deductible contributions to an Individual Retirement Account.
2. Credit card and bank account statements with no tax or other long-term significance can be discarded after a year; remaining statements should be kept for up to seven years. If a consumer receives a detailed annual statement, they should keep it and shred the corresponding monthly statements
3. Shred-it Checklist - Don’t just toss it, shred it!

•  Documents that include Social Security numbers, birthdates, PIN numbers or passwords
• Banking documents and other financial information
• Leases, contracts or letters that include signatures
• Pre-approved credit card applications
• Medical or dental bills

This is just one example of the good financial strategies that are available to you when you partner with a knowledgeable professional like those at Secured Retirement Advisors. In order to help you, we have recently updated our website and now offer many FREE downloadable resources which can help answer many retirement questions. Feel free to visit us at www.securedretirements.com and help yourself to our educational materials.  If you would like a complementary “3 Step Review” of your own retirement plan, call Secured Retirement Advisors at 952-460-3260.