Day 19 Of 30 Days Of Stay-At-Home Personal Finance Wins: Close Your Old Accounts

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What if you were able to come out of this time of social distancing and economic crisis with a stronger and healthier financial life? What if you looked at this as an opportunity to take a little bit of your extra time each day to work on your finances?

Since it takes me about 35 minutes to drive to work in the morning and 45 minutes on the way back home, I have an extra 1 hour and 20 minutes of my day that I don’t have to drive while I’m working from home that I can use to accomplish something. This doesn’t even take into consideration all of the networking and social events that would usually take up some of my time throughout the week.

Obviously, your situation is different than mine (and probably a whole lot different if you have kids at home who would otherwise be in daycare), but I’m guessing that we all have at least a little extra time right now that we can dedicate to our personal finances.

It looks like we’re going to continue to practice our social distancing skills at least through April, and now is a great time to work on creating a better financial situation, so I’m giving you 30 days of stay-at-home personal finance wins throughout April.

Unfortunately, I understand that there are many who have (and who will) lose their jobs during this time of uncertainty and objectively will not come out on the other side of this with a stronger financial situation. Hopefully, many of these personal finance wins can help to lessen the blow and make things easier on them. On the other hand, I think that many of these wins are still relevant to those who are fortunate enough to be in a position to not have to worry about their job and their finances to help them build a healthier financial life.

Day 19: Close Your Old Accounts

A couple of weeks ago on day 9 you should have found and securely stored the login information to your financial accounts. Did you come across some accounts that you don’t use or that you need to do something with? Did you really find all of the accounts that you have out there?

I often find that people have old financial accounts floating around that they either forgot about or that they just haven’t taken the time to clean up. Take some time this week to consolidate and close those old accounts that you’ve let sit out there until now. I completely understand how easy it is to not do anything about them and I’ll be right there with you cleaning up a couple of old accounts that I had before I got married, but that I haven’t taken the time to actually close.

Just because you’re no longer using an account doesn’t mean that it’s closed. Those old checking accounts that you used to use which now have $0 balances will remain open until you actually contact the bank to have them closed. One of the most common things that I see when helping clients clean up their personal finances is having retirement accounts from their previous jobs at many different institutions that they didn’t know what to do with. Consolidating them will make your life easier.

Each account that you have open that you don’t use is a vulnerability in your personal finances. Someone could potentially gain access to them and commit fraud without your knowledge since you don’t pay attention to them or the accounts could be charged fees and end up being overdrawn. If it’s not an account that you’re actively using and won’t use anytime soon, then do yourself the favor of figuring out the best way to close and/or consolidate it with an active account.