Now that you have done a full account inventory and closed your inactive accounts, it is time to making tracking your accounts and organizing your statements easier and quicker. I use a few free tools to keep my accounts and transactions organized, and you get them setup in just a few minutes.
Empower
Empower is my personal finance hub. It is a 100% free tool that gives you your account balances, recent transactions, spending patterns, and investment analysis all in one place.
Signing up is an easy, fast process. Once you are signed up, you just link Empower with your online banking, credit card, and investment accounts. Empower takes care of the rest.
Every time you log in, Empower will refresh your data with the newest balances and transactions for each account. Rather than logging into each bank website every time you want to check in on your money, you can just login to one site.
Empower also offers a mobile app for both iOS and Android so you can check your balances on the go.
When I signed up for Empower, I did a big dive into my fees on my investments and found ways to save over $300 per year on mutual fund fees in my retirement accounts. To say that this free tool paid for itself is a huge understatement.
Manilla
Update: Manilla has since closed down, but be sure to check out my post on Manilla alternatives.Manilla is a free, online file cabinet that you can use to automatically download all of your bank statements, credit card statements, investment statements, and online bills in one place automatically.
Before Manilla, I would log into each bank website once a month and save a PDF copy of my statements to my external hard drive. I don’t do that anymore, because Manilla does it all for me automatically.
Each month when my new statements are ready, Manilla automatically downloads the PDF and saves it to my secure, online account. Whenever I need to look something up or view an old statement, it is there waiting for me.
When I refinanced my mortgage last year, I needed to give all of my most recent statements to the bank for the review process. It just took a few seconds and I had everything together and sent off by email.
Award Wallet
While you are busy automating things, keep it going with your travel rewards tracking. If you enjoy travel, it is part of your personal finance circumstances and you should treat your travel rewards like you money.
To track my money, I use Empower, for my miles and points, I use Award Wallet. Award Wallet is a free site that works just like Empower for frequent flyer miles and hotel points tracking.
It is quick and easy to setup and helps me track my balances and expiration dates.
TripIt
While are already talking about travel, I use one more site all the time that is free and saves me time and hassle when tracking my actual travel. TripIt automatically imports my flight and hotel information from my Gmail account and creates an itinerary complete with directions, weather forecasts, and anything else I need to know.
Don’t Work Hard For Your Money, Make It Work For You
Why did we do an account inventory and put everything in these free, automated tools? To save time and effort. You shouldn’t have to spend a lot of time working on your money. It should be simple and automated. Your money should work for you.
How do you save time managing your finances? Share your best tips in the comments.
Automation, automation, automation…it has saved me a whole lot of headaches and even better, allows me to keep an eagles eyeview over my financial situation. No more missed payments and bills and with the bigger financial picture in site I can easily strateize for the future.
Great minds think alike Simon!
Nice list, I use tripit but need something to automate accounts. With accounts in different countries it makes things more complicated.
My first place I ever found to automate my accounts was Mint. I used it for a long time, but found I use Personal Capital more and more. Automating account tracking saves SO much time.
I too use Personal Capital. It’s so easy to use and it actually works! I’ve tried Mint in the past, but my accounts would never update. I would always get error messages. Not with personal capital.
I wish PC would add more budgeting features like Mint has. But other than that, I agree it works so much better. And much more in depth and useful analysis of my investments.