I spend hours every single month looking over my finances to feel in control, but now I’m ready to save time and automate my finances in 4 ways

• Looking over my finances intently makes me feel in control, but I waste too much time doing it.
• To save more of my time, I’ve decided to automate my finances even though I was against it before.
• I’ve set up robo-advisors for my investments, bill autopayments, recurring transfers to savings, and more.
• Read more at Personal Finance Insider.

I spend too much time every month managing my finances. I’ve become obsessed with making sure I avoid money mistakes, account for every penny that I have, and stick to my budget every month no matter what.

Not only do I check in on my finances almost every day for a few minutes, but I block off two hours at the end each month to do my own accounting, bookkeeping, and budgeting. 

I wanted to find ways to reduce the amount of time I’m spending looking over my finances and moving money around. For a while, I was so against following any advice that involved automating my finances, like setting up automatic payments and using robo-advisors handling my investments.

And the truth is, I’m still weary of the idea, because having a pulse on every aspect of my finances makes me feel in control. After spending most of my 20s mismanaging my money, that sense of control helps me feel accountable.

However, I know that I’m making things more complicated than they need to be. Now that I’ve organized my finances, have a monthly budget template, and adjusted my spending habits, I’m ready to try out some new methods to handle my money.

In an effort to save time and take my finances to the next level, here are four ways I’m automating my finances on a monthly basis.

1. Setting up recurring investments 

Keeping up with my investments is a top priority of mine. Currently, I spend at least an hour making sure I put cash into my retirement fund, individual stocks, and cryptocurrency portfolio every month.

I do this because I like to micromanage all of my investments to see what I want to change. Over the past six months, I haven’t found myself making any changes, and so I have decided to automate this.

So, I set up automatic withdrawals from my bank account to my TD Ameritrade account, which houses my retirement fund. Moving forward, on the first of every month, a few hundred dollars will be tunneled automatically into my retirement fund. 

I was also able to set up recurring purchases of cryptocurrency through my Coinbase account, and determined a small amount of cash I want to withdraw from my bank account every month to buy two digital coins.

Finally, I set up an account with a robo-advisor investment platform, Betterment, that is going to allocate my money across a predetermined ratio of stocks and bonds on the first of every month. I can manage which types of stocks and bonds that the money goes into, but after that, I’ll be hands-off with the account.

Even though I was against using a robo-advisor for investments, I’ve found that trying to pick stocks and manage my index funds is too time-consuming. Plus, I don’t have the desire to research every month so I’m making the right trades.

It took me about 45 minutes to set this up, and I will spend 10 minutes a week checking in on all these accounts for peace of mind. 

2. Giving into autopay for my credit card bills

For a while, I avoided the idea of doing automatic payments for my credit card bill every month. I liked to take the time to analyze all of my purchases and double check that my statement was correct. Doing this took more than 30 minutes once a month. 

One big takeaway I had, after reviewing all my credit card statements in 2021, was that I spend practically the same amount every month. Setting up automatic payments not only seemed fitting, but it didn’t make me feel like I’d become reckless with my bills.

Instead, I am now going to spend five minutes a week looking over my statement to make sure those recent purchases are correct. Then, I autopay my bill without the headache of first double checking every purchase. 

3. Doing a recurring transfer into my emergency account 

Part of my budget includes a set amount of money every month for my emergency account. This is important to me because as a entrepreneur, I want to make sure I have a nest of cash to rely on in case of an emergency or loss of work. 

Since the amount I stow away every month is consistent, I set up an automatic transfer to occur on the first of the month so that cash from my main account can travel to my emergency fund. 

During the months that I earned more than expected, I can manually add extra money into my emergency fund — but I don’t anticipate that happening more than a few times a year. 

4. Having a budget software run a report for me 

One of the most time-consuming parts of managing my finances is sitting down and accounting for my spending, saving, and investment gains and losses. This takes me anywhere from an hour to 90 minutes every month.

I manually enter all my numbers into a self-created spreadsheet, and create a report on my own. Instead, I want to use a program like Mint or Hiatus moving forward, which can pull in all my data from my bank accounts, investment accounts, and credit card statements to show me what my finances looks like from the previous month.

Having a software do that for me will drastically reduce the amount of time I spend sitting down at the end of the month reviewing everything.

I suspect that by doing this, my monthly budget-setting session won’t take longer than 15 minutes moving forward.