How Do you automate your finances so you can financially thrive?

Automating your finances life is the key to staying financially sane as a busy working mom. I love talking and writing to other people about their finances, but I prefer the management of our family's finances to require as little brainpower as possible. Y'all, I got pre-teen and teen girls. My brain is already on overload as I navigate one emotional crisis after another.

You decide how much or our little you want to automate your finances. Invest in your financial struggles, so they stop becoming struggles.  I am all about the easy, not necessarily the least expensive. Consider automating the areas you get "financially stuck" in or financial tasks you don't like doing.

Financially Confident Mom

Suggestions to help you automate your finances:

Automate Your Finances with budgeting tools

If tracking your spending makes you want to reach for a bottle of Advil, consider automating the process. Use budgeting tools that will help you consistently stick to a budget. I do not believe in one-size-fits-all budgeting tools. Your budgeting tool of choice has to work with your personality and the time you have to budget. A few suggestions:

  1. Super detailed oriented- Tiller money software program or your excel spreadsheets
  2. David Ramsey superfan-Everyday dollar software program
  3. Want apps that track and categorizes your transactions-Mvelopes,  Mint,
  4. Like active FB group support and webinars- YNAB
  5. Want to see your entire financial life in one place- Personal Capital
  6. Don't want to research budgeting tools- Use your bank's budgeting tool.
  7. Want boundaries around spending- Budget with bank accounts
  8. Old school? Use cash envelopes or basic worksheets.

Automate Your Finances with online bill paying services

Automate paying your bills. I want to be clear: You still need to review your bills monthly to make sure there are no mistakes.

Decide how you want to automate your bills. You can either:

  1. Set up payments directly with your billers.
  2. Pay your bills through your bank. Most banks have a bill pay service to simplify bill paying.

Automate Your Finances with savings transfers

If you struggle to save, make it easy, and make it automatic. If you are pretty disciplined, open a savings account where you currently bank. If you struggle with dipping into your savings, opening a savings account at a separate bank.

Start slow. Choose an amount you can save consistently.

Next, choose how you want to automate your savings.  Below are two options

  1. Set-up automatic funds transfer from your checking to your savings account.
  2. Set-up payroll deductions to automatically go to your checking account.

Automate Your Finances with your employer's 401k tools

Retirement planning doesn't have to become a second job. Take advantage of your employer's retirement plan tools to help automate your retirement planning.

  1. Struggle with investment selections? Consider choosing a target-date fund closest to your retirement year. A target-date fund is a mutual fund pre-mixed with various investments, like stocks and bonds, designed for someone retiring the fund's year (i.e., Target Date Fund 2030). The fund will automatically update the investments to grow more conservative (less stock mutual funds) the closer you get to the date of the fund.
  2. Behind in savings? Use your retirement plan's Auto Escalate feature to increase your retirement contributions automatically. If you do not have the Auto Escalate feature, set a calendar reminder to increase your 401k contributions annually.

Automate Your Finances to help you control your spending

If you struggle with impulsive spending, use the following strategies to decrease your spending:

  1. Take all the shopping apps off your home page.
  2. Either unsubscribe from tempting sales ads or create another email specifically for subscriptions.
  3. Choose specific days out the week to shop.
  4. Use cash in the categories you struggle with the most, like eating out.

Automate Your Finances by choosing a meal planning system

Groceries is one of the few spending areas people can control. But to control grocery spending, it's essential to a meal plan. Choose a meal planning method that fits your budget, time, and your sanity.

  1. If you need help coming up with meal ideas, use Pinterest to pick and save your favorite meals or use a meal planning website.
  2. If you just want to cook with minimum thinking, consider a meal delivery service. You get a box with the meals and ingredients.
  3. If you, like me, don't want to cook daily, consider using freezer meal plans like The Family Freezer.  I prep the meals in gallon size bags (only takes about an hour, maybe 90 minutes at most), I freeze the bags, defrost overnight and stick them in my programmable Crockpot and that's it.
  4. Have some quick meals- frozen pizza, burgers, etc. on hand for the unexpected crazy days.
  5. After finding a few favorite meals, repeat the recipes. You become efficient with repetition. If you are continually making new meals, you never nail down the cooking process. Once you find 10-14 favorite emails circulate and occasionally add a new meal.
  6. If you hate grocery shopping, don't. Choose curbside pickup or a grocery delivery service.

Other areas to help automate your finances:

When I said I want to use as little brainpower as possible, I was not joking. Anything I have to look up or think about more than once I create a system around. I then try to find the easiest method to automate the task. The following are a few suggestions:

Automatically save passwords

Password Managers, like LastPass or iCloud Keychain, make saving your passwords easy. In case your wondering why I don't mention saving your passwords to your browser, it's because several tech professionals warn against it.

Store documents virtually

Cloud Storage Service  (Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, etc.) safely stores information online. If I can, I request all receipts emailed. I then put the receipts in Google under the receipts folder.  We also create Google folders for the following information:

  • Home Purchase/Mortgage
  • Warranty Information
  • Home Repairs/Maintenance
  • Auto Repair/Maintenance
  • General Receipts
  • Vital Records as a backup
  • All the "mom blog" email freebies stuff I sign up for (Moms, you know what I mean)

Use online calendars for reminders

Anything that occupies my brain for longer than a few minutes I put on a calendar. Those lingering reminders that pop up in your brain during random moments- put as a reminder on your Online Calendars.

  1. Set up recurring bill reminders in your calendar. This is super helpful for quarterly and annual bills.
  2. Schedule a "Budget review day" weekly to pay bills, review spending, plan for current and future spending.
  3. Set up reminders to cancel trial subscriptions.
  4. Set up reminders to review finances- a monthly focus, so you don't go nuts. Our monthly newsletters cover a monthly financial theme with action steps to take. If you do the action steps in each newsletter, you would have completed a review of your finances by the end of the year.
  5. If your school offers it, sync your kid's school calendar with yours so you can plan for school breaks and extra expenses like childcare when kids or out of school or the extra food you may have to buy.
  6. Not financial, but set up reminders for those pesky things that slip your mind, like changing toothbrushes or change air filters.

Manage your email subscriptions

Unsubscribe services allow you to control your subscriptions and declutter your email inbox with a few clicks.

Financially Confident Mom

In Conclusion

Your finances exist as a tool to help you financially create a life around what matters to you most. It's OK to invest in areas of struggles to maintain your sanity. Think through the roadblocks you've had to reach your financial goals. Use this guide to pick at least one thing you will do to automate the roadblocks so you can clear a path to financially thriving.

How to Automate Your Finances