Have You Reviewed Your Financial Automation Recently?

Financial automation is a great tool for helping you manage your money and bills, but it’s important to periodically go over your setup. Leaving automated payments completely unattended increases your risk of missing a payment or overspending.

Your financial situation can change from month to month, and reviewing your automation often goes hand-in-hand with reviewing your budget. Here are some areas you may want to check.

Recurring Bills and Loan Payments

Nowadays, you can conveniently automate pretty much every monthly bill you receive. While that reduces your chances you’ll miss a payment on crucial things like utilities or your car loan, it also makes it easy to forget about these same payments.

Why does this matter? Here’s one possible hitch: If you make a one-time non-automated payment, some billers cancel your auto payment setup. If you don’t realize this has happened, you may miss paying future bills. But even if that scenario hasn’t come up, it’s good to check your setup every once in a while to make sure that an external change didn’t affect anything, your information is up to date, or your payment date is still working for you.

Remember: your automated pay date doesn’t have to be on the same day the bill is due. You can set it to pay a few days before the due date (so if something goes wrong, you have time to fix it), or you can move it to be closer to your payday

Subscription Services

Are you still paying for a subscription service you don’t use anymore? Maybe Netflix hasn’t had anything interesting the past few months and all you’ve been watching is Hulu. Reviewing your yearly, semi-yearly and monthly subscriptions is a great way to make sure you’re not leaking money.

 We recommend making a list or spreadsheet of your recurring subscriptions as part of your budget. Include the amount, when the charges hit, and how often you’re charged. You may already know you pay for streaming every month, but doing this helps you also catch those charges that occur every 6 or 12 months, too.

 Don’t get too attached to subscriptions you’re not using – you can always sign up again later.

Automated Savings

One of the best ways to ensure you’re saving money toward your goals every month is to automate it. That way, you don’t even have to think about it to regularly move part of your paycheck to your savings account.

 Regardless, it is important to regularly review your automated saving to make sure it’s still working for you. When you’re reviewing your budget and other automated payments, also check your auto-saving. Are you on track to meet your longer-term goals? Is the amount transferred each month working for you, or is it too much? Did you get a raise at work and can now save more? Did a major expense come up and you have to adjust your savings goal?

 Stay Aware of Your Finances

While financial automation is undeniably a helpful and efficient tool, there is danger if it’s left completely unattended. Setting and forgetting your auto-payments could lead you to bleed money or, ironically, miss payments. And not reviewing your automated savings could result in putting away too much or too little.

It’s already a smart idea to check in on your budget every once in a while – check in on your automation at the same time, too.

Source: https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/finance/spring-clean-your-finances-with-some-automation

Other Links:

https://www.hondafcu.org/digital-banking

https://hondafcu.enrich.org/courses/creating-a-budget

https://www.hondafcu.org/about-hfcu/news/tips-for-budgeting-better-in-the-new-year-(1)