100 Questions You Should Ask About Your Personal Finances: And The Answers You Need to Help You Save, Invest, and Grow Your Money - Softcover

Ilyce R. Glink is an award-winning journalist who specializes in personal finance and real estate. Her newspaper column, "Real Estate Matters," and her radio shows, Real Estate USA and The Real Estate Minute, are nationally syndicated. She has been a featured guest on the Today show and Oprah, as well as hundreds of other television and radio programs. Her articles have been published in Worth magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among other publications. She is also the bestselling author of 100 Questions Every First-Time Home Buyer Should Ask. Glink lives with her husband and sons outside Chicago. Her Internet address is ThinkGlink.com.

How Should I Organize My Personal Finances?

Organizing your personal finances is just like cleaning out that dreaded family closet. You have to clear out all of the stuff you don't need, can't use, and won't want in the future. Then you have to create some sort of childproof/dogproof/neighborproof space in which you can store what you will need. Believe me, the paperwork--and the space you'll need for it--is a lot less than you think. A shoebox isn't the perfect size, but you can manage your personal finances with (1) a plastic storage facility with hanging files and (2) a bound ledger. Total cost? Less than $20.

Tracking Your Personal Finances

Keeping track of your personal finances is the only way you'll become intimately familiar with them. To create the financial future you want, you have to get a handle on where you are today. Here are several ways you can keep track of your personal finances.

Option 1: Paper and Pencil
How well does this option work? Tracking your expenses on paper is fine, especially if you've got the time. But it has its limitations.
        
In 1984, I went to study in Europe for a year. In addition to the cash I'd saved from working during summer vacation and my first two years of school, my mother and grandfather gave me a small stipend to help pay the cost of the year abroad. In exchange, my mother requested that I keep track of every "pence" I spent. My grandfather bought me a bound cash journal, something he used every week of his adult life to keep track of his financial portfolio.
        
Years later, my mother told me she didn't think I'd really do it. But I did. I wrote down every pound I spent during my year in Wales, down to the last pence. Every time I bought a London Times, the cost went into the journal. When I bought an old overcoat at an Oxfam store (the equivalent of our vintage clothing shops), I wrote it down. If I took a trip, bought a pack of gum, or picked up a round at the local pub, I put down how much I spent. Looking back, I am amazed that I was able to buy that old brown wool Oxfam coat for only ú8, or about $10. (At the time, the English pound was worth about $1.25. During the year I was there, it fell to $1.05.) I have a strong recollection of the details of that year abroad, precisely because I wrote down every amount I spent and what the exchange rate was at a given time. By the end of the year, I had spent ú4,374.35, which, at an average exchange rate for the year of about $1.20, came to $5,249.22. That princely sum (I was completely broke when I returned) included all trips, meals, lodging, clothes, haircuts, books, film, and film processing for the year, plus gifts for my family. The only thing it didn't include was school tuition and the cost of the dorm.
        
However, writing down every expense took a lot of time. I took my little red-and-black book everywhere with me, and wrote down expenses immediately so I wouldn't forget them. I saved receipts and entered those later if it wasn't possible to take the book with me. By the end of the year, the spine had collapsed, and my little book was being held together with rubber bands.
        
Here's what I learned from my year-long experiment of writing down everything I spent: It works. It also takes time, and I didn't have a lot of cash or expenses back then. Today, with a husband and two children, I live in a two-income household with many more expenses and a lot less time. Our monthly expenses look pretty typical for an average family of four (no dog!), and include things like a mortgage, doctor bills, insurance, and childcare. On the personal side, I'm having a good day if I can remember to pick up the kids at school on time, throw a load of laundry in the dryer on the way out, and take an umbrella in a downpour. Writing down every expense by hand wouldn't work that easily now. However, it can be done. As I said earlier, it will cost you less than $20 to set up your whole system. If you can't afford a computer or software, it's better to write down your income expenses and investments than not keep excellent track of them at all. After all, for thousands of years, people kept excellent track of these items on paper.
        
The method has some limitations. If you want to find a specific expense, you have to trust your memory and perhaps go back through years of pages to find it. If you want to compare how much you've spent, year to year, you'll need some additional time with a calculator. If you want to find a way to cut down your budget, you'll have to study what you spent week by week.
        
So there's your first option. A plastic storage box with hanging files from the hardware store, and a cash journal.

Option 2: A Computer

Your second option is to try electronic financial management software like Intuit's Quicken® or Microsoft Money®.
        
Computers are changing the face of everything we do. We can do two to three times the former amount of work with half the help simply because of the power of computer chips. For managing your money, a computer and software give you the tools of a professional. Not only will they help you track your daily expenses, but you can then look at those expenses on a daily, weekly, monthly, or year-to-date basis. The software can compare year-to-year totals with a keystroke. You can pull out a certain category of expenses--say, food--and see how much you spent on grocery bills each week, month, or year. You can pull out a certain department store, or restaurant, and see how much you've spent there in the past year. Or on travel. Or insurance premiums. You can balance your checkbook, keep track of cash received, run an amortization table for your mortgage, manage your stock portfolio, and keep track of how many miles you drive your car (useful if you can deduct them on your taxes). With Quicken®, you can even downloa
d your expenses directly into the companion tax preparation software, TurboTax®.
        
Basically, you can do everything you'd want to do when you analyze and track your personal finances. The cost? You can spend as little as $500 on a used computer or, for around $750, you can get a discontinued model at a computer superstore. You don't need all the newest bells and whistles to run personal financial software. They're typically designed for computers with a minimum of a 486 processor, or about what was considered top of the line in the mid-1990s. If you can afford one, you'll earn back your expense by being able to keep a much closer watch on your finances, and by finding ways to save its purchase price through eliminating some of the waste in your budget. (For tips on budgeting, check out Question 6.) In addition, if you purchase a scanner, you can scan in documents you need or want to save. A modem (which may come with your computer) will allow you to connect to the Internet and tap into virtually limitless amounts of free information.
        
Although you'll have to spend $500 to $1,000, you'll soon find that a computer is indispensable. As of 1998, nearly 50 percent of all households had personal computers, and more than 5 million households purchase them each year. More than 70 percent of the population had access to computers either at home or at work. This is the way of the future, and I'll go out on a limb here and suggest that if you don't decide to track your finances by computer today, you will do so within five years.
        
What are the limitations of personal finance software? If there's a blackout and you haven't saved everything, you could lose it. If you have saved everything, but your computer dies and you don't have your information backed up on a disk, you could lose it. If you don't have your software protected by a password, your two-year-old child could do some real damage. But that's about it. A small price to pay for the pleasure of using software to track expenses.

Option 3: An Accountant or a Money Manager

If you can afford the hourly fee, you could hire an accountant to track your expenses, write your checks, and manage your personal finances. Many famous actors and wealthy business executives do this. Some of the actors do it because they're financially irresponsible and would blow through $1 million faster than you can blink. The executives do it because they're so busy managing multibillion-dollar corporations they don't have the time to write personal checks (and their spouses don't want the job).
        
Hiring someone else to manage your cash sounds easy, but it's expensive. And, if you don't choose wisely, you could wind up with an accountant or money manager who blows through it, loses it, or
steals it. Then you'd have to spend more money and time suing the money manager you chose, which would defeat the purpose of hiring someone in the first place.

What Kinds of Files Do I Need to Keep?

Human beings are born collectors. We collect everything from art, coins, crystal, and silver to faded Levis, beanie babies, baseball cards, and original Michael Jordan Nike basketball shoes. We also save memorabilia that have no intrinsic value whatsoever, like ticket stubs from a first date. Often, we save these things because of a misguided notion that they will be "worth something" someday, or that we'll need them in some desperate moment in the future.
        
Paper seems to accumulate faster than other things, and we hang onto it longer. We save letters and cards, our children's artwork and homework. We save our tax returns, old W-2s, and bank statements. Who ...