There are many articles on how to be frugal, how to save more, earn more and invest for high returns.

All this is good advice, and the Internet is full of such articles, blogs, videos, courses.

However the key to saving money and investing for growth is action and the discipline to implement the good practices.

If you go through most of the articles, some common themes emerge such as:

• Pay yourself first
• Do a proper budget or at least allocate money to your various expenses
• Big tax refunds are not cause to celebrate
• Get out of debt
• Regularly invest a little
• Use Robo advisors
• and so on…

Yet lot of people (some say 78% of Americans) live paycheck to paycheck, and will not be able to cough up $400 cash in times of emergency.

With so much of good advice and technology out there, why then we still have the problem with more than 50% of the population? What is different with the 10-20% who manage to create and keep wealth?

I think the answer lies in being organized, intentional and disciplined. As Dave Ramsey said “Personal Finance is more behavior than numbers”.

It requires a system to be organized and manage your money. Once the system is in place and you get into the habit of it, you will automatically resist impulsive behavior.

In this post, I will highlight some of the systems that I follow to organize this area of my life. And remember, the more organized and intentional you are on personal finance, it impacts rest of the areas of your life as well. Cliche, right? Yes but difficult to implement.

There are 5 parts to the system:

1. Automate
2. Cap
3. Archive
4. Remind
5. Learn

Just for fun, lets rearrange and call this the CARLA system (Cap, Automate, Remind, Learn and Archive). Really the order does not matter.

1. Automate

Automation is the heart of any system. And with most of the financial products employing high end technology, there is no reason to avoid automation.

A simple automation makes the “Pay yourself first” a breeze like operation.

For example, in my case, the first bi-monthly paycheck (pre and post tax) simply goes to my mortgage and investments (retirement, 529 plan, HSA, investments). I just cannot see it in my checking account by the 2nd or 5th of the month.

How do I run my expenses and pay my bills then? Another automation.

All my bill payments are set on the one and only credit card that I use. It is completely automated so I don’t need to remind myself to pay electricity, water or phone bills. The same credit card is used for first half of the month to buy essentials.

By the same system, the second bi-monthly paycheck pays off the credit card bill in full.

A portion of that also goes into savings for short term goals (provided the credit card was not overused – we will talk about caps in next section).

Advantages:

• Naturally implements the Pay Yourself First.
• Automated bill payments, so no chance of forgetting and running into credit problems.
• Earn points on the credit card, as all expenses are charged to the one.
• The credit card is automatically paid off within the month.

Risks: 

• Need to control expenses as the credit card balance should not overshoot the projected amount.
• Unexpected debits to the checking account (checks issued, or charged by institutions) may cause overdraft scenarios if not careful or kept track of such expected transactions.

The Starter Kit explains how to setup a system from scratch.

2. Cap

One of the toughest part of personal finance behavior is to cap your spending. No amount of technology or automation can address this adequately. There are budget apps, reminder apps, envelope system but at the end of the day, if you are armed with a credit card, there is no stopping you.

There are two ways to address this:

1. If you are using a credit card, then absolutely you will need a budgeting and expense tracking app. I use YNAB (You Need a Budget) but I have heard people liking Mint or Personal Capital. In these apps, you can set limits for spending under each category like Food, Transportation, Utilities and Fun. Here is a referral link to YNAB.
2. However a more effective way and not to run into debt, you can automate to transfer the estimated monthly expenses to another checking account, and use the ATM/debit card of that account. As soon as you see the account is drying up, you know you have to rein in your spending. As you do this more, you will slowly understand the pattern and be able to make or adjust estimates.

Advantages:

• Having a cap of expenses is non-negotiable in the pursuit of good personal finance habits.
• You know exactly where each dollar is going and how to optimize or reduce the outflow.

Risks:

• The first approach definitely has the risk of running into credit card debt, and not able to pay in full.
• The second approach is safer but if you are not keeping track, can hit you with overdraft fees or embarrassing card decline at the checkout counter.

Yet another simple budgeting mechanism is described in Budget – Grow the tree upside-down .

3. Archive

A good archiving system is also key to good personal finance habits. Not only habit, but it keeps you stress-free. Remember the scrambling during tax filing season, looking for bank statements, dividend results, interest certificate etc.

Moreover we have multiple sources of information, statements coming through email, snail mail, website downloads, or even previously archived repositories.

A simple system I follow consists of a uniform folder structure across multiple sources of information.

There are 4 aspects of personal finance that you need to keep track of.

• Banking – Accounts, statements, credit cards, interest certificates.
• Investments – Portfolio Statements, dividend statements, recommendations, documents from financial advisers.
• Taxation – Everything related to your taxes year wise. Returns, documents sent to CPA, CPA communication, IRS communication and so on. For each year, I have the following folders.
  • Year
    • Source documents – Everything I sent to the CPA
    • Processing – All drafts and iterations I had with the CPA
    • Final – Final copies of the filed return and acknowledgements etc.
    • IRS – In case there are any direct interactions with IRS after filing (notices, response, tax due, tax paid etc.).
• Insurance – Insurance policies, forms, statements, estate planning documents.
• Bills and Receipts – Miscellaneous bills and receipts if they do not fall into above categories.

With the above organization, you can simply create the archival system in all your information sources.

1. Gmail – create these as labels or email folders.
2. Evernote – you can create notebooks and store documents as notes under each notebook.
3. Google Drive – create folders. You can save attachments from gmail directly to these Drive folders.
4. Laptop local drive – Sometimes it is best to store in the local drive than cloud. That is, if you are uncomfortable storing documents containing sensitive information (SSN, date of birth) into the cloud. Be sure to periodically back this up into external hard drives.
5. Physical documents – Paper statements can be either scanned and stored in above places, or simply dropped into file cabinet drawers, with appropriate labels. The labels should follow the same categorization.

Once you have the uniform structure across all these platforms, storage and finding information is easy.

Advantages: 

• Easy to file and find.
• Following same structure in all systems that you use.

Risks:

• None at all.

4. Remind

So you have automated, capped and archived personal finance. But what about still those actions to be taken, follow-ups to be done and making sure time sensitive things do not fall through the cracks?

I don’t want to describe personal productivity or time management here, but an essential part of managing personal finance is timing. There are taxes to be paid quarterly, investments to be made, or simply a phone call to be made.

Choose whatever system works for you as reminders, be it an app on your phone, or calendar on the laptop.

For me, plain gmail works as it has a snooze facility, by which I can redirect any email to come back to my Inbox at the time I need to take action. In my opinion, it is an important tool in time management as now I can remember to take action at the right time. It just pops in my Inbox on that Sunday prior to the week I need to take action on that. 

Another good platform for keeping track of your laundry list is Trello. I use it quite extensively and the concept of board and cards, helps keep things visually clear.

Advantages: 

• Even if you automate everything, there will be things for which action needed to be taken timely.
• Remain stress free and auto-magically respond or follow-up with people at the right time. Sometimes this surprises people as they may have promised to do something (or get back to you) and you follow up on the agreed date. 

Risks: 

• Unless you stick to one system (Trello or Gmail), you run the risk of multiple apps keeping track of your to-do lists and confuse you enough not to take action or update new items.
• You may run the risk of irritating some people who do not like to be followed up, especially if they wanted to forget what they promised.

5. Learn

I cannot emphasize this enough and with the plethora of information on the Internet, whatever I say will sound like cliche.

However as with any field, it is important to keep yourself up-to-date with advances in personal finance topics. 

One of the simplest ways is to dedicate a couple of hours every week, to read about different topics, blogs and videos of personal finance. You can subscribe to magazines like Money or Kiplinger. Or simply come back to this blog as I normally post every week.

Advantages: 

• Learning is always good, and opens up new opportunities for you.
• You build your own system and strategy as you read and learn techniques others have used.

Risks:

• Don’t get obsessed by personal finance reading, as it can get repetitive very easily. You may end up wasting lot of time reading the same message in different ways.
• You may take wrong action or jump into investments without fully understanding the consequences, or simply following some author’s thumb rule from a book.

These are the Five essential elements of a good system that can be setup with minimal infrastructure. It worked for me and I hope you find it useful. 

My CARLA system (Cap, Automate, Remind, Learn and Archive) – a system to automate, manage and grow personal finance.