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I was going to write a post about organizing your finances, because it’s tax time again and that means you’re probably feeling guilty about not having your finances in order.
But I give up.
Lots of personal finance bloggers (including me here and here) have written about how messy finances hurt you, the real costs of financial clutter, the connections between mental, physical and financial clutter, steps to taming financial clutter, quick and dirty ways to organize financial paperwork, and so on.
The thing is, you probably don’t need to find the right magazine or blog article to help you untangle the mess. More likely, the process of getting organized is overwhelming so you keep putting it off. Life goes along and the sky doesn’t fall. Sometimes you feel guilty, but the truth is you just don’t care that much.
It can be liberating to admit that you don’t care really about something that makes you feel guilty. Once you admit it, you can break the cycle of
- feeling guilty and stressed,
- making brief, ineffective attempts to get organized, then
- forgetting about it altogether until months go by and you feel guilty and stressed again, usually around tax time.
If you can admit that you don’t care then you’re ready to make a radical decision: pay someone else to care!
There’s a whole organization, the National Association of Professional Organizers, devoted to helping people get organized. Find an organizer near you and pay them to help you sort, purge and file your financial papers and set up a paper management system to deal with new paper coming into your home. Once that’s done, you’re ready to hire a financial organizing specialist (such as myself) to help you set up a home and/or small-business bookkeeping system, a budget, a tax organizer for your accountant, etc.
This advice is not for people facing special organizing challenges, such as people with ADD/ADHD or with chronic disorganization issues, for whom disorganization significantly impacts quality of life. If you think you may be chronically disorganized, I suggest contacting the National Study Group On Chronic Disorganization for a referral to one of their specialists, and/or getting involved with Clutterers Anonymous or Messies Anonymous.
That said, the people I am addressing may (in my experience) have one or two traits in common with those facing special organizing challenges, such as
- an unrealistic sense of time,
- a pattern of starting then dropping organizing tasks, or
- difficulty focusing on organizing tasks.
For these people, disorganization is an annoying and guilt-inducing distraction that leads to missed opportunities like making a Roth contribution by deadline, and to inconveniences like unnecessary finance charges and time wasted finding tax-related documents. But it doesn’t significantly impact happiness and well being.
For these people, getting organized is about as important and appealing as dieting to lose 15-20 lbs. It means fighting procrastination, accepting realistic time estimates for reaching goals, and staying on track from start to finish.
Once when I complained about dieting, a friend told me to “just give up and buy bigger clothes.” It seemed like an interesting choice: either stop whining about being overweight and just buy some bigger clothes, or get serious about losing weight.
Real life is a little more subtle. I didn’t really want to just completely give up, nor did I want to make the changes necessary to meet my weight loss goals. Luckily there’s a third way: do something, anything that will make some incremental progress no matter how small. I hired a personal trainer to give me an assessment and exercise program. I still need to lose more weight, but work out a lot now and feel much, much better.
Getting organized is time consuming and exhausting because there are so many decisions to make and it’s lonely work. If you have a friend or professional organizer to keep you company and talk to you as you make literally hundreds of boring decisions, the work goes a lot faster.
In subsequent posts I’ll talk about tiny incremental changes you can make to get your finances better organized. Meanwhile, pick up the phone and get some help!
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I consider myself fairly organized. However, I know of someone (I’m actually writing a blog post about this person I know tomorrow-different topic) who is obsessively disorganized. But there is a method to her madness, but it is madness. She has piles of ‘to be filed’ piles that grow uncontrollably. It takes her years to get back to them. Yet, she can say that her piles are all logical and there is a reason behind them. Now that I’ve read your post, I realize that this has something to do with her inability to get her finances in order!
I just saw a show last night called “Hoarders” that focused on people who have this uncontrollable need to keep EVERYTHING. The producers brought on a professional organizer and a psychologist to help the person try to clean-up their homes, which were basically unlivable from all the clutter.
It was basically a losing proposition. These people were just unable and/or unwilling to change their ways.
I guess my point is, your friend was right. When people are unwilling to commit to a particular course of action, why pretend otherwise?
What was kind of funny was seeing these professional organizers really meet their match when they were put up against these people who absolutely refused to give up their disorganized cluttered lifestyle.
By the end of the show they were exasperated!
Best,
Len
Len Penzo dot Com
Hi Len, yes, as a member of the National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO) I’m aware of the TV show and know that hoarding is a challenging behavior, difficult to change, but there’s lots of great resources out there for hoarders and their families and friends, like this site
http://www.hoarders.org/
maintained by a local RN I know.