What You Should Know About Going Paperless With Your Finances

You may not have as deep of an understanding of your spending habit and finances if you go paperless.

By: WSPA Staff | News Channel 7
Published: November 20, 2009

Paper bills can lead to a messy desk and more to shred…
But going paperless may not always be the answer to simplifying your life. That’s because it could come back to haunt you when it comes to your finances.
Marketing and Management Instructor Ashley Wright at Spartanburg Community College says our attention spans online are to blame

“Everybody is so busy, you know, it's just another email you get with your statement that gets piled in your inbox, another thing you've got to look at, I'll look at it later. Well later could be too late," said Wright.

A web usability expert found that when we look at a web page our eyes tend to follow the page in a patter similar to the letter F. By the time we’re half way down the page, we tend to tune out.

And for those of us who sign up to have our credit card and cell phone bills automatically debited from our bank accounts – there’s an even stronger chance of failing to fully comprehend the overall picture of what you’re spending.

Of course we can always print those online statements, but we rarely do. And yet more and more companies have succeeded in convincing us to go paperless. They say it’s better for the environment, faster and easier. Perhaps that’s why nearly a quarter of people have gone paperless compared to 13% just two years ago.

The fact that firms save about a dollar per statement never seems to leak out to consumers.
But for those of you who are still big fans of paperless, you may want to look into some of the Personal finance management tools that have popped up to help you out.

Sites like www.mint.com and www.wesabe.com offer tools that allow consumers to interpret their finances by pulling together online statements with pie charts that show just how much you spend on things like groceries and gas.

So they use the web to make our statements easier to comprehend. It’s an approach we will likely see more of as banks continue to emphasize paperless – and now they have a better case for what you get in return.