By now, California is deep into the second month of the Shelter In Place order, first issued on March 19th. It can be hard to keep your head up each day when it feels like everything has been canceled, postponed, closed or boarded up. However, we know that, like all things, this too shall pass and the normalcy of life will once again embrace us.

Until then, here are a few ideas to make sure you take advantage of the downtime and tighten up some of your finances. Hopefully we all feel accomplished and ready to enjoy the renaissance of our lifestyles with those looming “to-dos” now done.

• In times like these, having multiple accounts with different logins to account for can create a lot of stress. Gather all your financial statements and talk to someone about consolidating where it makes sense.

• Review beneficiary and trust designations on your investment accounts and insurance policies.

• Download our fillable expense sheet at https://sweeneymichel.com/library to better understand where your money goes each month.

• Print your credit card summaries for 2019 and analyze your spending. Where can you save? How many monthly subscriptions do you pay for and which ones can you cut? Pare down to only those you use often, and take the total of the monthly savings and splurge on something fun or DoorDash a great meal for your family.

• Video the inside and outside of your home and email to yourself for insurance in case of a disaster. This is much easier to review and make a list of personal property than having to try and list everything you owned from memory.

• Sign up for Fidsafe.com or another online document vault and put your important documents in a secure cloud for easy access from anywhere in the world (i.e. quarantined in Italy).

• Review passports and drivers license renewal dates. Use this time to download renewals so you are ready for your next adventure post COVID-19 pandemic.

• Go to www.annualcreditreport.com and pull your credit reports for free from all three reporting agencies and review for errors and accuracy.