Clariity Website Review: Family Finances Made Easy: Bible Money Matters

Clariity Website Review: Family Finances Made Easy

Posted: 16 Mar 2011 05:00 AM PDT

The world is such a busy place these days, and it can often seem like there just aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done that we need to. With all the busyness of life, it can be easy to let a lot of important financial tasks just remain undone, simply because we feel we don’t have the time.

Among those things that people often don’t do are saving for retirement, saving for their children’s education, creating a will, and setting up an emergency fund.

A couple of months ago a blogging friend of mine brought to my attention a new website that aims to empower families to help them to make decisions about family and finances, and bring it all together in one place to make it easy to execute. Today I thought I’d do a quick review of the family and financial website called Clariity.com

Company History

From the Clariity website:

The story of Clariity began 37 years ago with a boy in a bucolic rural town growing up in an impoverished, single-parent home. The boy often wondered what it would be like to have a close-knit family and to be free from the daily stress of trying to make ends meet. Through God’s grace and blessings, this boy grew up and started a family of his own. He vowed to start a new legacy of family unity based on a strong spiritual and financial foundation. Clariity was founded with the mission of empowering families to make informed decisions about life and family finances as they journey through their greatest adventures together.

"Clariity is the convergence of three things that I cherish most in life — my family, my spiritual walk and equipping families to manage their finances." Scott Amyx Co-Founder & CEO

So the website is all about things I find very important as well, family and finances!

Signing Up For Clariity

Signing up for Clariity was extremely simple, and is free of charge. The site makes their money through advertising and premium memberships, but most people can get the most out of the free service.

To sign up you just go to their homepage, click on “sign up” and then it will ask you for some extremely basic information including email, password and zip code. (Later on you can enter more information to further personalize the service, things like age, gender, marriage status, kids and so forth.)

Once you sign up you’ll receive an email confirming that your account has been created, and you’re set to go!

What Does Clariity Do?

Clariity is essentially a clearing house for family financial issues, and an online family financial planning site. Anything a family may need to do in their financial life, Clariity wants you to be able to do through them. Opening a 529 education savings account, creating a will, setting home purchase savings goals and more. They can also request others to give to their family savings goals, and give Clariity gift cards to others to help them reach their goals.

The site has only recently launched, but currently there are a few main things you can do at their site.

Give Meaningful Gifts Via Clariity Gift Cards

One of the main things you can now do through Clariity is to give and receive financial gifts to go towards certain savings goals - through Clariity gift cards. So say say you know someone who just had a baby. You can give them the gift of a Clariity gift card to go towards the child’s college education. Or you know someone is saving for a house and you want to pitch in. Just give them a Clariity gift card which can be used towards their savings goal. You can also give just a generic Clariity gift card to be used for the goal of the recipients choice.

Once a gift card is received, t herecipient can then link up their existing savings account or education savings account on Clariity, and the money will go right into the account. If they don’t have one they can sign up for one through Clariity.

Setting Goals And Planning Ahead

Currently when you sign up for Clariity you can do a number of things including setting goals for a home purchase, vacation, wedding, college savings, car purchase or other miscellaneous savings goal. You can also put in place the first steps of estate planning, including creating a will. To do all that you’ll go to their easy to use “goals map” shown below.

Once on the map, there are a variety of things you can do.

Setting Up A 529 College Savings Plan

Choosing a 529 college savings plan on Clariity is as easy as 1, 2, 3.

When you start the process you just select how long you have to save, and how much you want to save every month. It will then take you to a page with 529 ESA accounts available for your state. Of course residents aren’t limited to investing in their own State’s plan. Another state may offer a plan that performs better and has lower fees. If there is no tax break offered for in-state investors you can also choose from plans from other states and sort through them by total expense ratio, enrollment fees, user ratings, plan name. When I checked my state plan – in Minnesota, there were some advantages to that plan for Minnesota residents, so it’s a good idea to check.

Once you figure out which one meets your needs, you just complete an online questionnaire, Clariity will mail you a completed and verified application, which you can then sign, enclose a check and send in to your new 529 institution to open your account. They will then open your account and confirm it with you.

Savings Goals

Beyond college savings, you can also set up a variety of other savings goals within Clariity. Anything from a home or auto purchase to a vacation or a wedding savings goal. Each goal calculator will have you select how much you want to save, how long you have to save, and how much you want to save every month. Then it will give you some options of where to save your money. You can either link an existing account, or they’ll also give you a list of savings account options as well.

Estate Planning

One thing that you can do on Clariity that I’ve been putting off is creating a will.

Doing the will is a simple step by step process, after which you can print your will, get it notarized – and file it with your county records clerk. The site will ask you for your testators (person who is making the will), your estate’s executors, names and DOB for your children, guardians for any minors, bequests you’d like to make, property you’re leaving, additional powers and provisions (like cremation vs. burial, etc) and a section for a living will. It seems to be pretty thorough, and I think it should be fine for most simple situations. More complicated situations should probably still seek an attorney’s advice, and the site offers to set you up for a free consultation with an estate planning attorney at the end, in case you’re interested.

Conclusion

The idea behind Clariity is to become a one stop shop for families trying to make sound financial decisions about education, wills, savings, and more – and to allow their friends and family to help contribute towards those goals.

While the site has just re-launched, and the options on the site are still a work in progress, it definitely has some promise. Their tools for setting up a 529 education savings account, and for creating a will are easy and straight forward. The savings goals options will allow families to put together a plan.

So for now I would go ahead and give the site a tentative thumbs up. Some things I’d like to see in the near future include better instructions on some of the pages and more options for helping families to plan out certain financial situations in their lives, beyond savings goals and wills. All in all, however, a solid launch with some useful tools.

This article was written by Peter Anderson. Peter Anderson is a Christian, husband to his beautiful wife Maria, and father to his baby boy, Carter. He loves reading and writing about personal finance, and also loves a good board game every now and again. You can find out more about him on the about page or check out his design site at http://www.logosforwebsites.com. You can also follow him on Twitter at @moneymatters.

7 Reasons Your Budget Might Fail

Posted: 15 Mar 2011 07:03 AM PDT

Have you ever started a budget just to watch it fail miserably? I know I've been there. The problem for me was that when I fell off the budget wagon, it took a while for me to get back on track. Part of me was discouraged and the other part wasn't even sure how to set a budget at all.

If you can relate, just know that there is hope! You can actually succeed with a budget. One of the best ways to be successful is to know why you failed in the first place, so here's a glimpse into why my budget failed a few time.

1. Unrealistic Goals

You can't expect to pay off $50,000 in debt in one year if you only make $40,000. Sounds obvious, but before you make your goals, find out how much discretionary income you're projected to have in the year and make your goal around that figure.

The same is true for each category. If you need to cut your grocery bill, you'll probably have better success cutting it over 2-3 months and not in one fell swoop.

2. No Room For Fun

Nothing's worse than feeling like you're a slave to debt AND a budget. My wife and I felt more in control when we allocated some 'fun' money in the budget. We used $40 each per month and simply budgeted for it. It made sticking to the rest of the budget easier once we implemented the 'fun' account.

3. It's Not Simple Enough

When we first started keeping track of our spending, it was really a complicated mess. There were way too many categories and it was tough to cut even one of the categories. Reducing the categories from 20 to 12 helped us to make better decisions and to stick to our goals for each month.

4. Too Hard To Monitor

One of the hardest parts of a budget first starting out was monitoring the transactions. We solved this problem by using mint.com to track our spending. Ever since then, our transactions have fallen into each category almost automatically and it's been really simple.

Other options include mvelopes, an online budgeting tool that is based on the envelope system of budgeting. Of course, you can always break out actual white envelopes too! The important thing is to make it easy on yourself – and these tool can help.

5. Everything's an Emergency

Emergencies are everywhere and they always seem to have price tags of $500 or more. They can really kill your budgeting enthusiasm, but having an emergency fund can really keep you on track.

We learned this the hard way, and it took a while to finally build our emergency fund, but it's made budgeting so much easier.

6. You're All By Yourself

If you're happily married, you shouldn't feel alone in your budgeting goals. It sounds cheesy, but you need to communicate about which categories are necessary and which ones can be slimmed. Practice an 'open budget' policy and review the categories together every month. Speak up if you think something needs to change – but do yourself a favor and leave the blame game out of the conversation.

7. You're Not Serious About It

I can write about budgeting until my keys break off…it doesn't do any good unless you really want to get on track with your money.

So how do you get serious about a budget? Well, it's different for everyone. For us, we knew that our goals to pay down debt would never happen unless we stuck to a budget. If you're having a hard time convincing yourself, go back to #1 and review why you're budgeting in the first place. If it's important, you'll find a way to make your budget work.

Have you ever failed at a budget? What did you do to get back on board with it? Did you do any of the items presented above?

This article was written by Tim Fraticelli. Tim is a personal finance writer at Faith and Finance a Christian financial help blog that provides financial insights for individuals, businesses, and churches. Outside of finance, Tim enjoys spending time with his wife, playing the saxophone, reading economics books, and a good game of RISK or Catan. Find him on Twitter and Facebook.

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Rabu, 16 Maret 2011