Mess causes stress.
At work, guess how much time the average employee spends a year looking for things they can't find. Try six weeks. And at home, it's 12 days out of the year. Over the span of a decade, that means you could be spending up to 60 weeks at the office trying to find lost items and four months at home pulling your hair out looking for your car keys, iPhone and other random stuff.
Simplify your life
In July 2016, Capital One conducted the Simplify Your Life survey to find out what ways Americans can simplify their personal finances. Turns out, money matters and love life are the two toughest areas for people to simplify.
When asked, "Which would be the easiest to simplify?" here's how over a thousand Americans (ages 18-54) responded:
* Social Life: 27%
* Home Life: 23%
* Work Life: 21%
* Financial Life: 15%
* Love Life: 14%
Social life seems easiest to declutter—simply unfollow or unfriend random strangers who are posing as Facebook or Twitter friends. And decline invitations from people you barely know. And when it comes to home life (23 percent), donate or sell those useless things that are overstuffing the garage.
But the complexity of love life is another beast, along with money matters. It seems much easier to streamline a mathematically-driven area. In Capital One's survey, here's how people would simplify their finances.
Forty-seven percent of respondents said that creating a feasible budget would simplify their wallet. That's because if we understand our money's limitations, that would make buying decisions much easier since we'd know what pricey items are out of reach.
What about credit cards? Other studies find that credit card offers have become more complicated in recent years. Retailers and banks have broadened their credit card programs to entice consumers to use plastic. While more card options such as cash back, discounts, airline miles and other perks are welcome benefits to shoppers, they add to the complexity.
However, there are credit products that are bucking this trend. Nearly a quarter (22 percent) of Americans in the Simplify Your Life survey said that using straightforward credit card rewards and offers—such as Quicksilver or Venture from Capital One—is a way to streamline personal finances.
With credit cards, respondents want consolidated information on their mobile devices.
That means FinTech startups and established banks would be prudent to streamline the user experience across all digital touchpoints. That is, when customers visit their mobile and online portals, the interface should be as straightforward as possible, with most or all data presented on the screen. Capital One Wallet helps consumers keep track of all of their purchases in real-time and keeps them organized on the go.
In the Simplify Your Life survey, nearly a quarter (22%) said that notifications of unusual or duplicate charges was a must-have credit card management tool—like Second Look from Capital One. Such notifications reduce the need to check all transactions in your monthly statements and provide greater assurance of accuracy.
Clutter bombards our minds and distracts our attention from what matters. Technology is supposed to help us become more effective. But there's an irony in making a diverse array of gadgets, offers and services available for our consumption—we're left with an overwhelming number of choices.
When it comes to our wallets, there's a need to constantly focus on what's important and that means looking for tools that simplify our financial life, not complicate it.
Share This Article
