Plumbers Have the Worst Pipes

I spend eight hours of my day communicating, educating and pontificating on credit union products, the wise use of credit, the importance of savings, the virtues of investing, and innovative tools to manage one’s financial fitness.

You’d think, that if you looked into my personal life, you’d find a perfectly balance checkbook, a smooth running family budget, pristinely organized files of important documents and fine tuned retirement plan.

You’d be wrong.

I’m embarrassed to admit it, but my personal financial house is pretty darn messy. I need more life insurance. I need to sit down with our investment advisor. I bounced a few checks this year and I neglected to pay a few parking tickets (until someone named Bruce called).

My 2007 New Years Resolution was to be more organized, more proactive in my finances.

That is what I have been working on this morning. It has probably been over a year since I checked in on our retirement savings (ack!). So I went to Home Banking to see how those accounts were doing.

There is a little known secret about our Home Banking system…. Did you know that you can aggregate all of your retirement accounts in one column so you can see all of them at a glance? It even adds them up for you so you can see the total of your savings at once.

It under our Bill Payer system (and we wonder why people don’t find it!). Go to Bill Payer, then MoneyHQ (again – another sooo intuitive name). It takes about 20 minutes to set all of your accounts up. You need to know the url, user name and password of the companies where you have fund. Once you put it all in, its there every time you want to look at it.

There was something strangely comforting to see all five of my investment accounts, right there in a row, where I left them last year, with little indicators such as “updated 42 minutes ago” and “updated 17 minutes ago”. I wanted to pat my computer on its smart little head and say, “thanks for keeping that safe while I was out of touch.” Yes, I felt a little better about life after seeing those accounts so neatly laid out for me, clearly updating for the past 12 months. (It didn’t hurt at all that the market was kind to me either!)

So if you are like me and your 2007 new years resolution is to be more organized, I recommend two things to you: 1. Check out our retirement savings aggregator on Home Banking. 2. Watch for a class we will be hosting on keeping your personal papers organized. It’s May 22 and more information will be on the front page of the website soon.