Personal Finance

I Used to Think I Was Too Busy to Manage My Money - Now I Use These 4 Simple Strategies to Stay on Top

David Beren

Published: February 3, 2025 11:59 am

No matter how busy life gets, one thing you can’t ignore or stop doing is remembering to manage your money. It’s not just important anymore. It’s now critical to have an established process for knowing exactly how much you have, what’s owed, and how much disposable income you can spend. 

There isn’t a whole lot of necessary debate around the notion that life gets busy for us all, and it’s very easy to let things like keeping a budget get away from us. The problem is that when this happens, everything financial in your life can quickly fall apart, leaving you in a poor financial position for the next month or the next six months. 

Automating Bill Payments

Without question, one of the most important and necessary ways you can manage a busy life without skipping out on financial responsibilities is to automate your bill payments. Not only is this convenient, but it eliminates fears about missing a bill or a due date. Better yet, you don’t have to worry about visiting a half dozen websites to ensure everything is paid. 

In most cases, you can pay online through company websites, such as those for your electric bill, cell phone payment, water bill, and more. The websites these corporations run will have an easy option to set up automatic payment either directly through a bank account or, in most cases, through a debit or credit card. 

T-Mobile Example

For the most part, you’ll go to a website like the T-Mobile website and provide it with all the information necessary to make a payment and set up automatic bill pay. The best part is that with automatic bill payment, you can receive $5 off your bill for every eligible line on your account, for automatic bill payment.

In my case, we save over $20 every month, or $240 annually, just by setting up automatic bill payments. It’s as easy as logging into your T-Mobile account, selecting your bill, scrolling down and selecting Autopay, making sure it’s activated, and then choosing your payment method. It’s that easy to get set up. 

So, the bottom line is that you don’t have to make as much effort to remember due dates and bill payments, which means less stress. You can also get a discount from some companies if you opt-in for automatic payments, which is a win-win for everyone. 

Automating Savings 

If you want to make sure you’re putting away money every month for the future, you can also take a few moments to create an automatic savings plan. The easiest way to do this is to have a checking and savings account at the same bank and link them together. This way, when you receive a direct deposit or make a deposit from an employer into your account, you can have a pre-determined amount of money automatically moved over to the savings account every month. 

The best part is that you set up exactly how much you want to move over every month. You can even set it up to be a portion of a direct deposit from an employer or just a certain amount of money from your checking account. The big takeaway here is that the process of automating monthly savings couldn’t be any easier. 

Handy Budgeting Apps

If you live online but worry about being too busy to manage money, the good news is that there are hundreds of apps out there to help you. You Need A Budget, or YNAB, is widely considered one of the favorites among these apps. 

While it does require a monthly or annual payment to get started, this payment, which you can even automate, is worth every penny. Once you sign up for the app, you can connect it to your bank with bank-level encryption and automatically import all your transactions. 

As soon as this is all setup, you can manage everything financial about your life. You can even include family members of up to six people in your profile to help manage multiple financial lives. You can even create some goal-tracking ideas to help you reach a specific savings amount, calculate loan payments, see your net worth grow, and so much more. 

The best reason to use these apps is that they bring all your financial activity into one easy-to-use dashboard. You get a complete view of your life and can see exactly where your money goes without logging into a dozen or two dozen different websites every month. 

Setting Up Automatic Investment Contributions

Whether through a financial powerhouse like Fidelity or another bank, setting up automatic investment contributions is just one more to automate your financial life. The best part is that it enables you to secure your financial future without worrying about whether or not you’ll remember to make contributions every month without a set schedule. 

Best of all, automatic contributions will reduce your temptation to spend and eliminate any hope you may have to try and time the market, which is usually a cause for disaster. The best way to get started is to set up direct deposit with your employer but have it go into multiple accounts. One payment can go into a checking account for bill payments, while another goes into an investment account. 

With a company like Fidelity, you can set up automatic investments into various account types. This includes but is not limited to mutual funds, bonds, ETFs, stocks, and more. It’s as simple as setting up a Fidelity account and determining which account type you want to invest in. From there, it’s just working with your employer to split your paycheck so a portion gets deposited right into a Fidelity account. All said and done, it shouldn’t take more than a few days from start to finish before your automatic investing account is ready to go. 

Enlisting The Help of a Financial Expert

As something of a theme in this entire discussion about automating your financial life, one more easy step is to enlist the help of a financial expert. Now, this won’t be your cousin Steve, who has done a lot of Reddit reading. Instead, this will be a qualified and licensed financial expert from a bank like Merrill Lynch, Charles Schwab, or Fidelity. 

You’ll want to spend some time meeting different financial experts to see who you have a good rapport with, but then the next step is easy. As you meet with this individual or even a team of financial advisors, you’ll work with them to help establish your financial goals, and they can, in turn, work with you to automate every single aspect of your life to help you meet these goals. 

There is a better-than-good chance they can and will ask you to set up automatic contributions. If you work with someone like Merrill Lynch, they’ll help you open Bank of America accounts that you can use to automate future bill payments on all your utilities and fixed expenses.