When you think of spring cleaning, you think of mopping your floors or scrubbing the tiles in your shower. But do you ever think of tidying up your bank accounts? You should!

When it comes to financial matters, you don’t want to be disorganized. It will literally cost you. So, take some time this season to spruce up your budgets and bank accounts.

How Can You Spring Clean Your Finances?

Look at Your Budget

Is your budget working for you? Take a look at it to see if your calculations match up well with your monthly household expenses or if you need to make some modifications. And if you don’t have a budget at all, you should make one right away. There are lots of great budgeting apps that you can download on your smartphone that come with easy-to-follow instructions.

Set Up Safety Nets

While you’re doing this routine maintenance, you should make sure you set up some financial safety nets for yourself. Without safety nets, you’re leaving yourself financially vulnerable. What will you do when there’s an expense that your budget doesn’t cover? Maybe your car breaks down, or your furnace stops working. What will you do?

One safety net is an emergency fund — this is a collection of your savings that you specifically reserve for unexpected, urgent expenses. See what savings you can dedicate to an emergency fund in your new and improved budget.

It will take time to build up an emergency fund, so it won’t be a dependable safety net right away. While you’re building up your fund, you can go to the website CreditFresh to apply for a personal line of credit to help you cover emergency costs. You could withdraw from your personal line of credit when you don’t have enough savings readily available. Think of it as a back-up plan for your back-up plan.

Purge Unnecessary Subscriptions

Inspect your bank statements for your subscription payments. Make a note of everything from online streaming services to monthly kit deliveries. Do you need all of them? Do you even use all of them? Have you forgotten that you even had these accounts? Download one of these apps to help you quit subscriptions so that you can stop wasting so much money without even realizing it.

Deal with Bills

Are you having a hard time keeping track of your bills? Now’s your chance to change that.

Start by making a master list of all of the bills that you have to pay (bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually). Make sure that you included all of these payments into your budget. Make a note of the usual due dates, and then set up notifications for these dates on your smartphone.

If you’re really tired of racking up late fees with bills, you can automate the bill payments so that the funds are directly removed from your bank account on the due date.

Change Your Password

And before you finish up your financial spring clean, you should change your online banking passwords to increase your cybersecurity. Choose strong and unique passwords — not your name, your birthday, or the word “password.” You don’t want someone cracking the code and getting access to your accounts.

Don’t leave your finances in a messy state. Roll up your sleeves and tidy them up. You’ll be really pleased with the results when you’re all done.

Image Credits: Image 2: Image by TaxCredits.net on Flickr