Financial Filing

Yes, it's that time of year again, i.e Tax Return time, and for the last three days, I've been getting my financial affairs in order.

The first and most pressing job was my tax return, which I've all but completed.  I just need to confirm one last section before I file it and then pay my voluntary National Insurance contribution, which I began doing last year when it first became possible to do so at the same time as filing your tax return.

Last year, after paying my NI contributions, I didn't actually receive any confirmation that it had been received, so this year I rang the NI offices to find out if they had received it, before making another payment.  It turns out that they did receive the payment, but only credited me with 3 weeks worth of credit for the year.  As I speak, they should be trying to sort it out for me and I should receive some confirmation by post in the near future, of what has gone on.

A very nice lady at the NI offices did advise me to open a personal tax account on HMRC's website, which I didn't realise you could do, in order to track my NI contributions in future.  On her advice, I did so and it makes it so easy to check how much NI you have paid to date, how much you need to pay to qualify for a full pension, etc., so I will be using it more regularly in future.

Once I'd taken care (or almost) of the tax return, I set about preparing next year's accounts too, up until the current time.  This makes it so much quicker when January comes around, as it is mostly already done, with just a few months worth of figures to add to complete it.

I also carried out a year's worth of financial filing.  I'm kind of organised, but I don't file my statements away each month, instead I store them all in a file box and when the time comes to do my Tax Return, I sort them into date order and file them away. Don't ask me why I use this system, but I do and it works, but it means that in January I have to have a good sort out and get on top of everything.

Having done these tasks, I then decided to do a bit more financial juggling.  If you've read my posts in the past year, you'll know that I'm now out of debt and living in the black and have been trying to increase any income I receive on savings by moving things around to get the best interest rates possible. 

I'd done this with some savings and am now getting better returns, but there were still some accounts that were barely earning any interest at all, one of the main ones being a building society account I opened over 10 years ago, to pay some share dividends into. These long held shares now mostly pay dividends directly into this account, so I need to keep it open if only for this purpose, but there was a sum of £1000 or so in there that was earning 0.1% interest, which was diabolical.  This equated to £1 per year. I knew I could do better elsewhere.

Today, I decided to remove most of this sum into my current account, from where I will decide the best place to invest it.  It may make a temporary move to another account before reaching it's final destination in a few months time, where it will be earning more than where it originally was.

I've been meaning to do this task for a while, but just never got around to trudging down to the building society to do it.  Now it's done, I can move it around via internet banking, from the comfort of my own home. It was just as well I did it really, as in the process, I discovered that the account was still registered at my old address, where I lived over 10 years ago, so I was able to update my records at the same time, bringing the account bang up to date.

Over the next few months, I will be doing a bit more juggling of savings, as certain short term interest rate deals expire, in order to get the best interest rates I can going forward and hopefully will continue to increase any passive earnings I am making on my savings and investments in doing so.

Tracking this passive income, is something I started to do back in May after reading a  financial advice type book that talked about how to do it and I'm happy to say that my passive income has almost doubled since then. It's still a very small sum and is a very long way from being enough to live off, but just knowing that I'm doing what I can to increase it on a monthly basis, is very encouraging and motivating too. When it reaches a sum that I can comfortably life off, barring any financial disasters, I should be financially independent, so this is definitely something worth doing to propel me towards and keep me focused on this goal.

So, it's been a busy few days and I have a couple of other tasks that I need to investigate once I finish writing this post, one of which is to try to minimise my gym membership payments, by possibly changing to a different type of monthly membership which could halve my payments.  I'll keep you posted with progress on this one.

Are you making any financial changes this year?