While You are Taking a Dooty – Do Your Financial Duties

Yeah – I Admit It

I get ALOT of things done on the toilet at work, at home, and on the go. Given how much technology has evolved, the days of me sitting in front of my lap top once a week to do our finances is over.

I make use of my toilet time to keep our finances up to date, research a few upcoming financial decisions, and even get a blog post or two written! Just like everyone else I love to goof off on the internet with my phone but I knock out most of my financial duties when I am taking a dooty!

Some Brief History

I would say about two years ago the technology and apps on my phone took a big swing upwards in their ability to handle common financial tasks. Before this point I always was focused on trying to find an hour once a week to check in on everything and update my trackers which was about 4 to 6 hours a month of time into my finances. I am down to at most 30 mins once a month and some toilet time and that’s it!

Pre-Requisite To Toilet Time Finances

I am a bit paranoid and I think it is healthy for everyone to be the same with their finances online. If an app doesn’t require two factor authentication (send you a text with a code to log in) – I don’t use the app on the road outside of my protected network at home. A vast majority of financial apps have this now which is a big plus! A few of the ones I use on the toilet don’t but they interface with my paypal account or have limited “risk” if they were compromised.

I describe a couple concepts below in passing – if you want more details I suggest reading theses first:

• I Hate Cash and How I Minimize It
• De-Stressing Your Finances With Some Organization

• Making Money Every-time You Buy Something – Why Cash Reward Cards are King

My Toilet Time Simple System

While I don’t spend ALL of my time on the toilet on my finances – I do my normal logins to my account during the week during Toilet Time:

Pre-payday activities – I may only do one or two of these on the toilet at a time:

1. Sweep my PayPal account to my bank account if I sold something or had reimbursements come through for any of my side schemes. Less than 1 min.
2. Sweep my Fidelity Account for interest/dividends to my bank and my 2% cash back I receive. These don’t always come in on the same day. Less than 1 min.
3. Redeem my cash rewards on my Amex typically around mid month. Less than 1 min.
4. Log into my bank account – typically just check in to see if all my normal bill pays are executing. This is a good fraud detection technique – if my account is compromised I’ll know pretty quickly even if my bank didn’t call me. Less than 1 min.
5. Log into my Amex and Fidelity Visa to see spend levels. As I have discussed in my other posts I really am focused on total spend in a month – E.g. if I know I shouldn’t spend more than $2K in a month and I see I have spent $1.5K with several weeks to go…. time to slow down! Ramen noodles here we come! Also a great fraud detection to see if there are any erroneous charges. Less than 2mins…. I usually look through my expenses quickly. Some people may prefer the application Mint for this (see my rationale below).
6. Research on the Toilet for new investments to add to my income portfolio….. I continue to look for investments that hit my criteria and have a few that I am watching…. I am never satisfied here and like to do research. Portfolio described here: Actionable Passive Income – An Ease Simple Scalable Diversified and Liquid Income Portfolio Starting at $25

If a Payday (you should know what day that is!):

1. Log in and check bank account balances. Calculate how much cash above my dollar threshold I have to deploy as defined here:. I Hate Cash and How I Minimize It. Less than a minute.
2. I simplified my life to two credit cards that I manually pay (vs auto pay) – I pay down my Amex to $0 and then pay down my Visa as much as I can. It typically have some cash left over but not always and let the balance ride as I clamp down on expenses. Typically less than 2 mins for both.
3. Execute my near term strategy for my cash….. this has ranged from paying down mortgage, investing, saving some cash for a donation etc…. the most important thing is that cash gets deployed!! Less than 1 min as long as you know where that money is going!

My once a month laptop time is only left to do:

1. Monthly logging of net worth for tracking. About 5 mins.
2. Categorizing expenses on my credit cards so I can see where my spend has gone. About 5 mins.
3. Looking at my 401k to see if I need to rebalance. About 5 mins if I have to rebalance.

Applications That I Have Tried and Abandoned

There are a lot of apps out there that have come and gone that try to manage everything in one place. Mint is the best out there and you might want to give it a try if you haven’t before. I abandoned it prior as I was still having to log into multiple apps to get everything done I wanted to accomplish…. just felt like an extra step that didn’t really net me much other than an extra login and more people with my banking info. Given my paranoia this app was delinked and deleted prior.

In Conclusion

For most people, Finances are not fun and they don’t want to spend much time on them. There are also people like me that like finances and still don’t want to spend too much time on them each week! Try to maximize that toilet time and look up your Buzzfeed articles for when you are relaxing when you get home. Just don’t forget to wipe!