15 Ways I Simplified My Finances Through Minimalism

The impact minimalism had on my finances was massive as well as practical. I became more organized, intentional, and just spent less time thinking about it because I had systems set in place, all while simultaneously being able to save more. I understand that money is often stressful, and as someone who practically worked for minimum wage until I was about 27, I can tell you from first-hand experience, one of the most important things about personal finance, at least in my experience, was being organized and clutter-free. Today I'm going to share 15 small ways I decluttered my finances, and hopefully they can help you the same way that they've helped me. But first, if you're new to my channel, thank you for stopping by. Here we talk about minimalism, frugal living, tech, and things of that nature, so if that sounds good to you and you end up liking the video, be sure to like, and please lay siege to the fort in St. Augustine. Let's get started. Consolidate bank accounts. I'm actually a little surprised how many people have multiple checkings and multiple savings accounts, but everyone's situation is different, so I understand. But I definitely think when it's possible, keeping fewer accounts and reducing the mental load to avoid anything like unnecessary fees is the way to go. And on top of having less bank accounts to actually think about and manage, since consolidating my accounts, I have the smaller added benefits like not having to wait any sort of period when transferring money between accounts, and nowadays a lot of banks and bank accounts even have the ability to invest money from their respective apps. I actually even think consolidating down to one or maybe two bank accounts at the max will make everything else on this list much easier, and was a great first step for me when came to decluttering my finances. Automate bill payments. Other than specifically wanting to click and manually pay your bills, I really don't see any disadvantages to automating bill payments. And funny enough, this is something I actually only started doing a couple years ago. Along with the perk of not having to remember the exact date bills are actually due, I've noticed with several of my bills, like my phone bill for example, actually offer a small discount when automatic payments are set up. It really isn't much, but it takes about $10 off my monthly bill, and it's just one less thing I have to remember to do on a monthly basis. I definitely recommend looking to see if automatic bill payments is an option for you, and especially if there's some sort of benefit attached to doing that. Use one or two credit cards. This is definitely more of a personal preference, and there are a couple caveats to this. I went from my peak amount of credit cards from five down to three, and I actually only use about one. And while my credit score did actually take a hit of a couple of points when a couple of my credit cards closed, my score did bounce back and it was overall worth it to have a couple less cards to think about. I now only own a couple credit cards from my bank and my Apple card. And out of every credit card I had, the Apple card is far and away the easiest and most convenient for me. I can go into details about these in a more specific finance video, but basically none of my cards have any sort of annual fees or foreign transaction fees, and I get a decent amount of cash back when spending. There are a lot of opinions about owning credit cards at all, but for me, as long as I stay on top of payments and avoid any interest, I'm actually getting about $40 or $50 a month back just through my Apple card spending, which is on the essentials anyways, so I really have no reason not to use it. Streamline subscriptions. I would actually consider myself a lot less strict about this than other people. I'm absolutely not advocating for a large amount of monthly subscriptions because they are way out of hand at this point. Streamlining subscriptions for me is more of a personal audit to see which ones are actually bringing some sort of value for me for their price. I think where subscription services are the most dangerous is when they're stacked on top of each other or ultimately the company's goal when we completely forget we're paying for them. What I've noticed is just like everything else in regards to minimalism, just focusing on the essential and being more intentional with maybe one subscription service has proved to be the best option in my experience. In other words, if a $10 a month music subscription genuinely makes your day-to-day better, I would say it's worth it. Create a single financial dashboard. This is something that absolutely helped me a lot in the early stages of decluttering my finances. Being able to see all my accounts, income, and spending on one single spreadsheet, app, or even Apple Notes was essential for me getting organized. This helped me spot spending patterns and reduced the mental effort of checking multiple different accounts. In Apple Notes, I would literally just create a grid and that was pretty much as sophisticated as I ever got with it. But overall, the point was to have every single category regarding my finances visible in one single place where I could plan and manage. Simplify budgeting categories. When I first got serious about my budgeting, I remember setting up about 10 different categories and I noticed that this created an unnecessary overcomplication. I would have the usual categories like food-related expenses or car-related expenses, whereas now I'm trying out more simple categories like needs, wants, and savings slash investing. Needs like being the non-negotiable bills, wants being like any form of entertainment, and saving slash investing is pretty self-explanatory. I'm still experimenting with this form of budgeting, but so far I think I prefer this broader set of categories rather than more specific ones because it gets the job done without all the extra details. You ever figure out a shortcut or a trick on your computer that took several steps and think, there's got to be an easy way to show someone this? Well, that's exactly why I started using Scribe. Just do the process once and Scribe turns it into a clean, shareable guide complete with screenshots, steps, and everything else others need to follow for themselves. Even just for me, it's great for keeping track of my own organization, workflow, and processes so that I don't forget steps later. It's like having a personal reference that's organized and always ready to go. I just hit record then walk through the exact steps of my process and Scribe captures everything automatically in the background. Once I'm done, Scribe instantly turns it into a step-by-step guide with screenshots and text. You can then customize your guide to make it look exactly how you want, personalize it with your branding, hide information in a screenshot, add section headings, and more. And you can share it anywhere in seconds. Share your guide however works best. Send a link, download a PDF, or add co-workers, or embed it anywhere. Just choose the method that best fits your workflow. The Guide Me feature takes it even further by bringing Scribe straight into your browser with interactive walkthroughs that show exactly where to click and move through each step as you go. My job actually uses Scribe to show us how to navigate certain websites, where we have to do things like new trainings. And I can say as someone who's now used Scribe on both sides, it's just incredibly convenient to have a step-by-step guide. It's just a huge time saver. It makes everything so much easier to follow. Go to scribe.howe.com or click the link in the description to get started for free. You can also unlock even more powerful features with Pro. Thanks again to Scribe for sponsoring this video. Review Monthly Spending Reviewing monthly spending is much easier if you have an app that does it for you. And thankfully, I think most bank account apps can actually do this. This is as simple as taking a quick look at all my statements to catch any errors, unusual charges, or recurring services that I might have forgotten about. I'm basically making sure this matches up with any form of manual spending and saving that I'm doing myself. If anything, it made me more aware of small frequent spending and I was naive to see how much it actually added up to at the end of every month. Essentially, a few minutes every month doing this helped me address problems that spread across several months. Automate Savings I actually think this was the very first thing I started doing on this entire list. And this is usually one of the first financial tips I give to anyone. Because I think even the smallest amount of money automated into savings is impactful. I was once told that even if I can only take $10 or $20 from my paycheck and move it into my savings, it was still worth doing. Because yes, while small amounts do compound over time, more importantly, I think it made me subconsciously be a lot more careful with my money because I was realizing how long it actually took to reach certain financial goals. Just treating the transfer of money from my checkings to my savings like a recurring bill kept me doing it on a regular basis and allowed it to grow over time. Digitize where possible On top of getting rid of physical clutter like random letters, bank statements, and credit card offers that companies will send, digitizing any statements or bank notifications is just so much of an easier way to stay organized. Instead of letting paper pile up, I created a simple habit of taking a picture or scanning receipts or important bills I needed to keep right after I got them. And they're stored clearly in a named folder, so things like returns, warranties, and taxes are easier to find if I need them. Which both reduces physical clutter and the mental stress of wondering where important documents are. Unless you're someone who really prefers to have the physical paper versions of things, I highly recommend trying this out. Set simpler financial goals I'm a huge advocate for setting smaller, simpler financial goals. When I first started saving aggressively, I had a huge, arguably unrealistic, short-term savings goal. I noticed that whenever I would make small transfers to my savings that I was able to afford, it seemed like almost zero progress was actually being made, and ultimately that would hurt my motivation to save more. I decided to set my goals in smaller increments, ones that I knew I would mathematically be able to reach in a short period of time, and then increase that goal accordingly. It was important that I learned not to be in some imaginary race with other people my age and to save as much money as possible, and to focus on my own personal wins. If you do have some savings or investing goals that you're working on, and they seem impossibly far away, maybe try taking away a zero or two from that number. Cancel redundant services What I mean here again are streaming services, but more specifically, overlapping services. I don't think anyone's blind to the fact that streaming services are quite literally getting more expensive every year, and frankly becoming more of a rip-off. And they begin to overlap when two shows you want to watch are on two different streaming platforms, forcing you to pay for two platforms for just two shows. I have a huge bone to pick with streaming services, like how they drip-feed us seasons across years. Don't even get me started on that. Canceling redundant services has absolutely freed up money in my monthly budget, and with a little bit of digging, I was actually able to get some of them for free. And that's because if you're lucky, sometimes services are included in things like your monthly phone bill, and in my case, my job. For example, I work in an office as a video editor, and I can use the Adobe Creative Cloud at home if I want, like Adobe Premiere Pro or Lightroom and Photoshop. Of course, I don't use Adobe products at home, but you get my point. I recommend seeing if any of your monthly bills or even your job has some sort of included subscription service for free. Minimize the amount of apps used If I could sum up this point in one single sentence, it would be, don't overcomplicate it. Over the years, I've tried many different apps to stay organized financially, or to budget, or both at the same time, and I noticed that for me, this would completely backfire and defeat the purpose of trying to be organized. By picking a single app that covered my core needs like tracking spending, viewing balances, or budgeting, instead of juggling multiple tools that overlapped, I noticed everything was much easier to manage in one single place. This reduced things like logins I had to remember, windows I had to have open, notifications, just making it easier to check my finances, and just keep a consistent, low-effort system. I'm actually browsing a handful of free budgeting apps that I would love to make a video on, but for right now, the free tier on GoodBudget is actually quite useful. Keep emergency fund separate but accessible Having an emergency fund built and stored safely and separately into something like a high-yield savings account allows it to be accessed fast if it's needed, but doesn't accidentally get used because, well, obviously, it's separate. And there really isn't a ton for me to elaborate on here. I just noticed I found a lot of peace of mind with having an emergency fund that I don't really ever think about, and hopefully I won't have to unless, well, of course, there's an emergency. Reduce amount of cards used I know I said use less credit cards, so let me explain this one specifically. I know it's probably common practice to carry multiple credit cards, and there are probably people who have multiple debit cards as well. I noticed that recently, I actually went an entire year without using one of my credit cards, and since then, I decided to only carry and use my debit card and my primary credit card, the Apple Card. By choosing one primary debit card and one main credit card, my finances stay more centralized, statements are easier to review, and it becomes much clearer where my money was actually going without cutting off access to the essentials. I still use those credit cards once a year to keep them active, and since there's no annual fee with them, I see no harm in them staying open. But ultimately, reducing the amount of cards that I carry and use helped me stay more financially organized in every regard because there were just fewer places I had to check to track my spending. Limit notifications Lastly is to limit notifications, which was actually a bigger deal for me than I initially realized. Too many alerts created background stress for me and made it feel urgent to check my finances and budget all the time and after almost every purchase. I decided to keep my notifications on only for critical things like payment failures if they didn't go through for some reason and turn off the routine purchase pings or promo alerts so I stay informed without being overwhelmed. Banks and credit card institutions want us to be spending as much as possible, so they're going to push notifications to us at every opportunity. So simply deciding to quiet it down whenever it was possible was absolutely worth doing. These were 15 small ways that I decluttered my finances, and I hope at least one or two of these resonates with you and makes a big difference for you. I probably should have said this at the beginning, but I'm by no means a financial expert. I never worked in finance. I'm just someone who worked at Trader Joe's for five years before this, so definitely take this all with a grain of salt. Anyways, as always, I appreciate the time you spent here and I appreciate you watching. If you did like this video and you like this type of content, be sure to like and consider subscribing to my channel, and I'll see you next time.