Day 9 Of 30 Days Of Stay-At-Home Personal Finance Wins: Find & Store Your Login Information

3 minute read

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 9: Find & Store Your Login Information

It’s amazing to me how many people don’t know how to login to their financial accounts. I would venture to say it’s most. So, if you’re in the majority here, then you can take some time to identify all of the accounts you have out there, create or find the login information, and figure out a secure method to store it that works well for you. Think especially hard about those old accounts that you’ve never done anything with and may have forgotten about.

Some of these will be retirement accounts like 401(k)s and IRAs while others will be logins to bank accounts, credit cards, insurance policies , mortgages, paystubs, etc. Don’t even look at your retirement account balances right now – you’re in the game for the long-term and the balance being lower than the last time that you saw it could make you panic, which we have already learned we shouldn’t do. Just find the login information and store it securely so that you know how to access it in the future.

There are a lot of reasons that I think this is a good exercise. Here are a few in no particular order:

It helps you to become more organized.
It will help you with future wins in the 30 Days Of Stay-At-Home Personal Finance Wins series.
It helps you to ensure that you’re the one with access to the accounts and that someone else doesn’t fraudulently figure out how to create the login information before you do.
Being organized can help your loved ones immensely if something were to happen to you.

Here are some more steps that you can take to get organized right now: Three Steps to Organize Your Finances & Prepare for 2019