Take a Few Hours and Unlock Some Cash

Take a Few Hours and Unlock Some Cash To be a modern American consumer is to be plagued by a never-endingDiamond tools, guilt-inducing stream of undone tasks.

There’s the nagging feeling that you don’t have the most cost-effective plan with the cable company and the vague sense that the money in your bank account could be earning more interest. Perhaps that flexible spending account reimbursement keeps slipping down your list of things to do, and you know in the back of your mind that you could save some money by raising your insurance deductibles.

Knocking these things off can get rid of the low-grade anxiety that results from the under-optimization of your financial life. But the real appeal is green cash money. If you could just cross a bunch of items off your list, there might be four figures in annual savings awaiting you.

Last year, when The New York Times Company required us all to take 10 unpaid days off, I got the kick in the pants I needed to chase that savings by attacking my own list. Diamond toolsI took one entire weekday to do things like signing up for a savings account with a higher yield and upgrading our household’s cash-back credit card.

While I didn’t quite make up all of the lost wages, the results were good enough that I decided to do a similar financial tuneup each and every year. I plan it for a weekday, when customer service departments are all open, though you could easily spread your tuneup across a couple of weeks of lunch hours.

So last week, I began anew, with tasks ranging from mundane items like switching the payment method on the landline bill to overhauling all of my family’s home insurance coverage.

How might you plan your own financial tuneup?

Today, we introduce an interactive checklist to give you some ideas. It includes things you should do each year, like rebalancing your investments, and others that you might have to do only once or, at most, once in a while, like raising your insurance deductibles. The checklist is a living document and one we hope to improve over time, so please send us feedback from the link on its home page.