Financial advice is valuable across the entire year, but many people are either too intimidated or just too busy to bother checking in on money matters as frequently as they should.
That makes spring cleaning time the perfect occasion to review the best financial advice for retirement, estate planning and other fiscal needs.
Here are five simple money tips, and areas where everyone could stand to check in once a year and do some spring cleaning:
Get a Free Credit Report: AnnualCreditReport.com offers you one free credit report each year under federal law. There are other sites and services that add other services for a price, but if you go to this site you can access your full credit history through one of the three major credit bureaus at no charge. There’s zero cost or obligation to you, so there’s no reason not to check up on your credit once a year.
Check Your Estate Plans: Nobody likes dwelling on their mortality, but making yourself uncomfortable once a year to update your will is preferable to leaving your family without a financial safety net — or worse, leaving them confused over your estate and arguing over the assets. Particularly if you’ve have a big life event like the birth of a child or the purchase of a house, it’s important to make sure your plans are updated. And if you don’t have life insurance or a disability plan? Now’s the perfect time to shop around.
Shred It: Outdated records with your Social Security number or other financial information are only a liability if they fall into the wrong hands, and should be shredded. Spring cleaning is the perfect time to go through the filing cabinet and rid yourself of the clutter. The IRS recommends a maximum of seven years for specific investment records or unreported income, so if you want to be super-safe, you can limit yourself to shredding documents older than that. But most employment tax records and other financial documents older than four years don’t have to be kept around.
Rebalance Your Portfolio: Given the impressive run for stocks in the last few years, it’s possible the asset mix in your 401k or IRA is out of whack. For round numbers, let’s say you want to be half in bonds and half in stocks, so you initially invested $10,000 in each. If stocks have gone up 20% in the last year while bonds haven’t budged, you’d now have $12,000 in stocks and $10,000 in bonds — a 55/45 mix. And with each passing year you get more and more out of whack if you don’t watch it. So if you haven’t checked in on your asset mix in a while, do so — and reset your allocation according to your long-term goals.
Confused? Get Help: At the end of the day, many complex financial decisions don’t have a one-size-fits-all answer you can find on the Internet with a quick Google search. Sometimes, spending a few hundred bucks to sit down with a licensed professional and discuss your tax situation, retirement plans or will is a wise use of time and money. There are a host of qualified professionals out there to help you, and in addition to the peace of mind, you will get a clear financial plan for the rest of the year and beyond.
Jeff Reeves is the editor of InvestorPlace.com and the author of The Frugal Investor’s Guide to Finding Great Stocks. Write him at editor@investorplace.com or follow him on Twitter via @JeffReevesIP. As of this writing, he did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned securities.
