Steve’s Three Favorite Features of the Financial Life Organizer

by Steven Witter, CFP®

Here are Steve’s three favorite features of the Financial Life Organizer:

Consolidation

I love being able to see our families entire financial life in one place. Instead of having to login to:

  • 2 different banks (11 different accounts)
  • 5 investment companies (8 different accounts)
  • 4 credit cards
  • 2 auto loans
  • 1 student loan
  • 2 life insurance policies
  • 1 mortgage loan
Now I can just login to one place and see everything instead of the 17 it would have been before.

Budgeting / Spending

While I don’t keep a strict budget every month I do put everything on my credit card for the rewards points (thank you Southwest) and try and keep this balance between $1,500 and $2,000 every month. I use the budgeting feature for common categories of my spending such as restaurants, fast food, gas, TV, etc. This allows me simply to notice is I spent a lot of a little in each category for the month. For example, I would like to spend about $200 a month on restaurants so when I see that I have only spend $100 with a week left in the month I know that it is ok to go out to a nice restaurant. Conversely if I see that I have already spent $250 that I should probably wait until next month.

Vault

This is my new online file cabinet. I was able to quickly take a picture on my phone of my life insurance policy and upload it to the vault in less than a minute. Now instead of the policy sitting in a drawer somewhere if I ever need the information I will have it right in front of me.

IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN SETTING UP YOUR FINANCIAL LIFE ORGANIZER, PLEASE LET US KNOW.

I would recommend adding the Financial Life Organizer to your cell phone, by following these instructions, since I find myself using it on there most of the time.