By Cebile Zibi, Head of Trade Marketing at Momentum Advice
Spring cleaning usually starts the same way. There’s the drawer nobody’s opened in months, the pile of “I’ll deal with this later” that somehow becomes permanent. The mess isn’t unmanageable, it’s just easier to close the door and walk away.
Money can be a little like that too. Maybe there’s an unopened bank statement. An old insurance policy you haven’t looked at since you took it out. A beneficiary nomination that still lists an ex-partner, or hasn’t been updated since before your children were born. None of it disappears just because you haven’t looked – it waits, gathering a little more complexity each year it’s left alone.
Why we avoid it
Financial avoidance usually doesn’t come from laziness. More often, it comes from feeling overwhelmed – not knowing where to start, or not wanting to know what you might find if you did.
Maybe it’s the fear that your debt is worse than you remember. Maybe it’s the discomfort of admitting you don’t fully understand a policy you’ve paid into for a decade. Whatever the reason, the effect is the same: not opening the statement doesn’t make the balance disappear, and postponing a decision doesn’t make it easier later – if anything, the longer it waits, the more tangled it gets.
Ask yourself a few questions
Before you can deal with financial clutter, it helps to know where it actually is. A few honest questions are likely to reveal more than you’d expect:
When last did you actually read your policy, rather than just knowing it exists?
Do you know who your current beneficiaries are – on your life policy, retirement fund and investments?
Would they still be your beneficiaries today?
Has anything changed since you last reviewed them – a marriage, a divorce, a new child, the death of someone you’d nominated?
Would your policy actually pay out enough for what your family would need?
Is there a financial document or decision you’ve been putting off for longer than you’d like to admit?
If any of these gave you pause, that’s useful information – the financial equivalent of finally opening the cupboard to see what’s actually in there.
Where advice comes in
This is where financial advice earns its value; not as a lecture on what you should already know, but as a structured way through what feels like too much to tackle alone.
You don’t need to arrive at a conversation with an adviser already understanding your tax position, your policy terms, or your investment performance.
That’s the point of the conversation. A good adviser’s job is to help you take stock of where you stand, identify what genuinely needs attention, and turn a backlog of half-finished financial tasks into a short list of next steps, in order of what matters most.
Financial spring cleaning was never meant to mean overhauling everything in one weekend. Nobody empties every cupboard at once. The goal is simply to stop letting things pile up unseen – one drawer, one policy, one overdue decision at a time.
The next right step
You don’t have to fix everything today. You don’t even have to know what everything includes yet.
You just have to stop avoiding the conversation.
That might mean pulling out your policy documents and actually reading them. It might mean checking who your beneficiaries are. It might simply mean picking up the phone and speaking to an adviser, even without a clear idea of what to ask.
Financial clarity doesn’t start with having all the answers. It starts with opening the door.
