You're facing three lazy days ahead -- the gap time between Christmas and New Year's Eve, when most businesses slow to a crawl and the leftovers are growing stale. What a perfect time to accomplish a few things that are best done now -- at the end of the year. Here are three tasks for three days:
Year-End Organizing: Now is the time of year to organize your financial records in time for tax season.
In April, you'll be running around trying to find all your tax-related papers and receipts. Instead, do it now. You don't need a fancy system. Just take some large baggies and a shoebox if you don't want to buy one of those plastic file boxes and dividers.
Here's what you need to do:
-- Put all those deductible receipts in separate baggies -- taxi receipts, dues and subscriptions, unreimbursed business expense receipts, and the letters you'll receive certifying your charitable donations.
-- If you're banking online, print out your check register. Or download the year's banking into a Quicken file. Take all your monthly statements, put an elastic band around them, and throw them in the shoebox as well. If you're still using a paper check register, ask your bank for a new one to start 2010. Put the old one in the shoebox.
-- Prepare a file for your year-end investment statements, which will start arriving in January. The ones from your 40l(k) or IRA won't have an impact on your taxes, but it's nice to keep them all together. That's also where you'll stash your W-2 from work, and any 1099 forms that arrive in January, showing interest or dividends or capital gains.
Getting your files organized is a project you can do in minutes. If you clean out your desk drawers and briefcase now, you'll have the bonus benefit of starting the New Year well organized and in control of your money for the year ahead.
Get Year-End Financial Help: Perhaps I should have put this task first. If you read the paragraphs above and thought that your financial life is too much of a mess to organize in a box, that your debts outweigh any possibility of paying future bills now to get deductions, then this next task is designed for you.
It's time to get the big picture -- the honest picture -- of your personal finances. And it's time to get help you can trust!
-- Start by piling up all the bills.
-- Then take a sheet of paper and make a list of the balance due on all your credit cards.
-- Next to that huge number, write the current minimum monthly payment and the interest rate. (If you used the card this past month and haven't yet received your bill, check the balance online or make a good estimate.)