Take a deep dive into your budget 

Spring is the perfect time to take a look at your budget and reassess how it’s working for you. Is it realistic? Are you sticking to it? Is it helping you meet your short- and long-term financial goals? If you don’t have a budget already, no problem. This is a great time to look at your spending and saving habits and build a weekly or monthly plan to help keep you on track. If you’re not sure where to start, RMCU’s free Money Mastermind course can give you a jumping-off point. 

Revamp your financial goals 

Whether you check in on your financial goals each month or quarter or you can’t remember the last time you took a long hard look at them, spring is an ideal season to reflect. Check-in with your retirement accounts, recalculate how long it will take at your current savings rate before you have enough for a down payment on a home, or strategize for paying off your debts. 

Unsubscribe from unused services 

There are lots of ways you can help cut costs and save more money each month while decluttering at the same time. But probably the easiest is to take on your subscription services. Whether for streaming shows, cloud storage, software, gyms, or magazines, what are you spending money on each month? If you use these services and love them, great. But if you can’t remember the last time you even logged on or went in, it might be worth unsubscribing, at least for a while. 

Ditch old papers 

Have you been hanging on to tax documents for decades or piling up past account statements because you don’t know what to do with them? Grab a scanner, go digital, and save yourself the storage space. For tax records, the IRS has different recommendations for how long you should hold on to them, depending on the situation. But for many people, three years is as long as you’d need to keep most records. If you are getting rid of paper documents with sensitive information on them, be sure to take them to a shredder, or buy your own. The next step is to go paperless where you can to keep more financial clutter from piling up. 

Check-in on policies 

Take the time to look at your insurance—whether for home, auto, or life—and see what you’re spending versus what your policies include. You don’t necessarily want to cut back on your insurance. After all, just because you haven’t needed your rental car coverage doesn’t mean you won’t in the future. Still, it’s a good idea to take a look at your policy details to see if your circumstances have changed, spurring a need to increase or decrease coverage in any area.  

See what your credit score has to say

Financial institutions like RMCU offer real-time credit score services, making it easy to keep an eye on your credit. But you also can get one free credit report each year from the major credit reporting bureaus. It’s smart to spread those out throughout the year, getting one from each one every quarter or so. For your spring cleaning, check in with your credit score and see where you stand. 

Many of these tools, from real-time credit score updates to bill pay and budgeting tools, come built in to your RMCU account: all you need to do is log in to online banking. Not a member yet? Apply now, and see what your financial future holds.