AAII Survey: How Well Do You Maintain Your Financial Records?

Last June, I moved from my condo of 11 years. As I was getting settled into my new home, one of the first things I did was go through my safe and purge my personal financial records. Old credit card and bank statements were relegated to the shredder, as were old mortgage and brokerage statements. I still have every income tax filing I have ever made, although these days they are housed electronically with TurboTax.

Also last year, before I traveled to Russia, I cataloged every credit card and bank account I had along with the login information for each and left that information with certain friends and family members in the unlikely event I didn’t return.

More recently, I updated my life insurance policies and beneficiaries as part of my information gathering for the creation of a trust.

For the most part, I have been pretty good about maintaining my financial records, but I have been paying closer attention the last year or so.

AAII Weekly Survey Question

For someone with a relatively simple financial profile, I was surprised how many different accounts I have. If someone had to step in and settle my estate without having the information I have collected, it would be a difficult task.

This got me thinking: how diligent are our readers when it comes to maintaining their financial records? So our latest weekly survey question asked:

How good of a job do you think you are doing to maintain your financial records?

Here are the results:

In all, 1,273 readers participated.

Only four votes out of more than 1,200 cast (0.314%) separated those who feel they do a very good job of maintaining their financial records to those who feel they could do a better job.

Only 3% indicated that they do not maintain their personal financial records.

Weekly Special Question

My system of keeping track of my financial records includes keeping hard copies in my fireproof safe, trust documents kept by my attorney and cloud-based stores of my records.

To see what systems our readers have for keeping track of their financial records, last week’s special question asked:

What kind of a system do you have in place to maintain your personal financial records? Is it paper-based or digitized?

In all, we received 185 responses.

Twenty-two percent say they rely solely on paper-based records while 46% say they have gone fully digital with their financial records. The remaining 32% say they use a combination of hard copies and digital storage for maintaining their financial records.

Here is a sampling of the responses as to the type of system they use for maintaining their personal financial records:

• “Simple, paper-based record system in three-ring binders with copies of essential info in safe deposit box.”
• “Personal financial records are maintained in both digitized and paper records, but digitized is the main. The ‘household’ records tend to be paper-based, and they could stand greater rigor in their organization.”
• “My system is becoming more digital and less paper, though I hesitate to make everything digital.”
• “I am a spreadsheet nut!”
• “I use Quicken for financial transactions and TurboTax for tax returns. I have electronic files of important records backed up on the cloud.”

Everybody has an opinion! Why not give us yours? Participate in our weekly member poll, updated every Monday, and see the results online at www.aaii.com/memberquestion.