Financial Maintenance to Keep Your Money Engine Running Smooth
May 26, 2007
Just like every business has support tasks that keep the income generation going, every household has financial housekeeping that needs to be done to keep expenditures low and things running efficiently. I usually have too many things going on at once and tend to neglect some of these support tasks so this weekend I decided to catch up on some financial housekeeping.
Organizing Documents
I went through and filed a bunch of personal and documents that have been on the to-do list. We use the HomeFile Financial Planning Organizer Kit to keep our personal documents organized. It breaks documents out into sections such as Auto, Bank Account, Credit, Expenses, Employment, etc.
HomeFile has an overview for each section that suggests what type of documents to store under that category, which type not to file in the category, and when its time to remove certain documents you have filed. The system comes with a a work book and quick find index to help locate documents more quickly.
Securing the Computer
I spent the morning installing anti-Virus Updates on our computer. It’s a dangerous thing but I was considerably out of date on my anti-virus and Windows updates. Now that I’m caught up, I’ll have to do a better job of staying on top of keeping our computer secure.
I’ve been running a security system by Invisus for about a year but recently found a great deal on Norton Internet Security and am going to switch back over to Norton when I find the time.
Hard Drive Cleanup
I’m a digital pack rat. I save practically everything I think I might need in the future. As a result our hard drive on our PC stood at almost 100% capacity this morning. I’ve cleaned off over one Gigabyte of data so far and still have several more to go.
Bill Analysis
As I looked through our bills, I realized we’re probably spending too much on phone service for an additional phone number I keep for business reasons but hardly ever use. Now I’m in the process of searching for cheaper phone service, thanks to Lazy Man‘s recommendation I’m checking out Skype to see if it will meet my needs.
Glamorous No, Necessary Yes
Support tasks such as these aren’t particularly fun but they’re necessary to prevent us from missing bill payments, encountering computer issues, and spending over our budget. I’d rather be writing on this site, building my business, or just relaxing with my family but sometimes a little maintenance is required.
I’m go to do a better job of doing small incremental tasks to help stay on top of things instead of putting them off then burning a whole Saturday. Hope you don’t have to spend your whole weekend doing maintenance like me, enjoy!
All posts by Ben Edwards
When you’re getting that ‘great’ deal for the Norton, don’t forget to add $12.50 a month for ID Theft Insurance for 2 people, $25,000 each, zero deductible. Because that is what you get with your Invisus subscription and that is what it will cost you if you buy it by itself. That makes the Invisus solution on $2.49 a month, and that includes unlimited technical support, 7AM MT – 7PM MT M-F, Sat. 7AM to 2PM.
And of course you will be speaking to Norton’s technical support, in India, as opposed to staying USA with the Invisus Direct support team.
Did you update with the brand new V2 of Counter spy that is in the Invisus suite?
They have the only product that scans for Spy ware up on start up. That is really big. And they picked up the recent Internet Explorer 7 Phising Scam when you manually type in Ebay.com, Paypal.com, and a few banks that are exposed as of now, it takes the information that you thought you were typing to another website. Norton’s 360 bypassed that. Let me know if you would dike me to email you the complete release on that.
Good luck.
Tom Mangone
Internet Safety Advocate
Buying anti-virus software is a waste of money. There are equally good and sometimes better options available for free.
This website has a whole bunch of resources for free. I have AVG on my home laptop and I install AVG, BitDefender and AntiVir on the computers of my clients.
Generally one of the first things I do when I start optimizing a client’s computer is uninstall the Norton and Mcafee anti-virus suites. They’re mostly clunky and inefficient, plus, after the whatever free trail they give you, they start charging you for updates, no good.
Try out the free software options, you won’t be disappointed.