Personal Finance Advice

Whether you get your bank account and debt statements in the regular mail or if you receive statement notifications by e-mail, you need to open them up and take a look.  It doesn’t matter if you have zero balances on your credit cards or if you always keep up on your checking account register down to the last penny…if you don’t take the time to review your monthly statements then you’re asking for trouble with your personal finances.

Mistakes happen.  It may be a mistake that you make, or may be a mistake made by the financial institution servicing your account.  The best way to realize that there is something going on that needs you attention is to pay attention to your accounts.  You’re much less likely to bounce a check or miss a credit card payment if you are actually familiar with what is going on with your accounts.

You don’t have to toil over your accounts every month, but you do need to take the time to have a look at the statements when they arrive.  Think about all the potential scenarios that can arise from not paying attention to your accounts:

1.  You have a credit card with a zero balance for so long that you get charged an inactivity fee.  You don’t open your statement so you don’t know the fee is on there, and by the time you realize what is going on your account has the original fee plus costly late fees for not paying the original fee.

2.  Your employer deposits the wrong amount of money into your checking account on payday.  You write the same checks and pay the same bills you always do, assuming that your deposit made it into your account without any glitches.  The next thing you know there are letters in your mailbox telling you about all the overdraft fees you owe.

3.  Someone gets their hands on your credit card number and makes some fraudulent charges.  The charges are small enough to where your credit card company does not flag them as potentially fraudulent, and by the time you realize what has happened several months have passed.

You can’t just assume that everything is business as usual when it comes to your bank accounts and debt.  There are simply too many things that can happen, most of which can be potentially very expensive if you don’t catch them in time.  The key to being successful with your personal finances is to be proactive.  If you’re passive with your accounts and merely assume that everything is fine then you open yourself up to plenty of problems.

You don’t have to make a big deal out of reviewing your accounts.  Just set aside a little bit of time once a month to review them all, or better yet you can open up the statements as they arrive and just take a quick glance at them.  If you don’t discover a problem with your account until months later then your chances of getting it cleared up dwindle considerably.