Smartlife

Financial professionals can be as specialized as doctors. One might be best at helping you manage investments, while another is the guy you absolutely have to talk to before filing your taxes. Sorting through financial professionals can be a little complicated though — do you really need one of each kind of professional to help make sure that all your paperwork is in order and your money is taken care of? It seems like that’s just an opportunity to pay out even more of your money in bills. Instead, there’s really only about five financial professionals you really need to know.

ING DIRECT offers an automated investment service called ShareBuilder. It mimics the way Direct Purchase and Dividend Reinvestment Plans (DRIPs) work, by allowing you to invest fixed amounts of money, with a price of $4 per share. With ShareBuilder, you don’t actually purchase individual shares of stock like you would with a traditional investment plan. Instead, because you buy shares based on the amount of money you want to invest, you often wind up with fractions of shares.

It seems like every personal finance book suggests tracking your expenses in order to figure out just where your money is going. It’s a tip that works pretty well: if you have a good idea of just what you’re spending your money on, you’re more likely to cut back on those items that you really don’t need. But tracking your expenses can be a lot of work. Not only do you have to write down where you leave each dollar, but you have to categorize your spending and decide where you’re really spending unnecessarily. There are a few techniques that can automate your expense tracking, though, and save you time as well as money.

Back when checks were the most common method of payment, many personal finance gurus suggested rounding up the payments you made to the nearest dollar when recording your checks in your register. Then, when you balanced your check book at the end of the month, you’d have a pleasant surprise of quite a bit of money you could transfer into your savings. These days, banks like Bank of America offer special programs that offer a similar system for debit cards: if you’re enrolled in Bank of America’s Keep the Change program, the difference between any payment you make with your card and the next dollar is automatically transferred to your savings account. The process is entirely automated and it’s marketed as an easy way to build up your savings. But is Keep the Change really worth it?

When you set up an automatic transfer into your savings account with a particular goal in mind, it can be easy to lose sight of your intentions. The money that you’re saving can get lost in the shuffle of your other savings and can get used for some purpose other than what you had intended. Beyond opening up an entirely separate savings account — and dealing with the associated fees — it can be difficult to keep your savings separate.

SmartyPig claims to solve that problem with a fairly simple automatic savings plan.

Your credit score is the deciding factor for everything from buying a car to landing a job to renting a piece of property to getting a cell phone plan. If you ignore your credit score, you can wind up in a whole heap of trouble — but who wants to spend tons of time checking up on their credit score and trying to improve it? Rather than obsessing about that important number, there are some steps you can take to automating your credit score.