You can focus on making more money or you can focus on spending less. Beyond that, there really aren’t many more options to put more cash in your bank account. The latter (playing financial defense), is the process of finding inefficiencies in your spending, reducing the amount of unnecessary spending, and keeping your cost of living to a reasonable level.

Spending less money is often the first piece of advice financial planners offer to those who are looking for ways to have more money. That’s probably because it’s the easiest and the quickest to achieve. You can instantly cancel subscriptions, stop eating out, and turn up/down your thermostat. Finding ways to increase your income, however, takes a little planning, creativity and action.

It’s a fantastic place to start because it makes you take a good hard look at your current situation and get a grasp of how money runs your life. In order to effectively plan to save money, you have to look at how you are currently spending it. When you analyze your personal income statement and realize how much money is actually coming in versus what is going out, it can be a real eye opener.

When you become consciously aware how quickly little expenses quickly add up exponentially by the end of the month, it becomes a motivating to be more cautious with the way you spend your hard earned money.

As you learn to keep more of your money, you can take the steps necessary to get out of debt faster or boost your investment portfolio. Suddenly you’re turning your savings into asset ownership, which allows you to make more money and increase your net worth.

Take one step at a time, but start with taking a good look at where your money is currently going. You might be surprised at what you uncover.

Millionaire Money Habit: You work hard for your money, so be sure you’re spending it on the things you really enjoy rather than throwing it away on things you don’t even realize.

With all of these blogs, books, radio broadcasts, magazines and so forth, personal finance sure seems complicated. There’s so much to manage and so much to do that it can be overwhelming and seem like a full-time job. It doesn’t need to be though.

I for one like to keep my life simple and do not enjoy balancing checkbooks, budgeting, paying off debt, managing bills, re-balancing my portfolio, and so on. If that’s what it would take I wouldn’t have time to make money and it wouldn’t be worth it.

Managing your money, however, does not need to be that complicated. I personally spend less than an hour a month working on my personal finances, and I think any more time spent on it would make things worse off. When I over-analyze things and make things more complicated than they need to be, I make mistakes – and in this case they could be costly mistakes.

Note that I am strictly speaking about managing money and current investments. I do spend an extra couple hours a week seeking investment opportunities, assessing the risk and continuing to develop my investment skills.

How do I spend less than an hour a month managing money? This is mostly accomplished through automation, but also by doing some upfront work in order to be organized.

• Bills are all paid for through automated bill paying, so I rarely even have to open my mail.
• I use automated programs that downloads income and spending activity, sorts it and produce a visualization of my money in and money out.
• The majority of my paper investments are in index funds. Money is automatically transferred to my brokerage account to purchase the same dollar amount every few weeks – thus being diversified while taking advantage of dollar-cost-averaging.
• Savings is also regularly transferred to a high-yield account, where it sits until it is ready to be used to purchase assets.

The rest of my time is spent seeking ways to increase cash flow, reduce taxes and eliminate inefficiencies in my spending.

While the media does a great job of complicating personal finance, it can really be quite simple. It may take some upfront work to analyze your income and expenses, create a budget, set up accounts for automatic bill pay, and to create a debt pay-down plan. Once you get the leg work out of the way, managing your money does not have to be a painful or time consuming process.

Millionaire Money Habit: Managing money can be developed just like any other skill. It may require some number crunching and analyzing at first, but over time it becomes second nature and effortless.

I recently received an email from my brother’s email account which was clearly not sent by him. He is a good writer, and this email was an English grammar nightmare. The message also used jargon that he would never use. The email talked about how he was in a lot of trouble because he was visiting the UK and someone stole his passport. It made me laugh because I know my brother has never flown internationally and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t even have a passport.

Knowing that this wasn’t my brother sending me this message, I did the typical things I do when I get spoof emails. I double checked the “reply to” or “return path” field (not the “from” field because anyone can fake this) to see where the email really came from.

In this case the “reply to” address was in fact my brother’s address, which really got me scratching my head. I figured he had a virus on his computer that was sending emails to the people in his address book. Instead of replying to the email, I forwarded it to him and manually typed in his email address just to be sure there wasn’t something I overlooked. Never reply directly to an email when there is fraud suspicion.

What I eventually found out was that someone had actually figured out his password and broke into his yahoo account, emailed everyone in his address book and changed his password so my brother could no longer login to the account.

Yikes! I was wondering why the email I received did not give me an address or account number to wire money. The impostor was waiting for me to reply and ask for that information.

This made me a bit nervous and I immediately started to think about all the things anyone can do once in someone else’s email account:

• Email friends and family to receive personal information, such as addresses, Social Security numbers, etc.
• Search the deleted mail box to find out what online service are being used, then go to those web pages to request a password reminder be sent to the email on file.
• Search emails that were sent from the account to obtain personal information and records.
• Once in, they can use your personal information to commit identity theft, charge your credit cards, empty your bank accounts, read your email, and lock you out of your online account by changing your password.

How Do They Steal Your Email?

There are a couple ways that hackers can break into your email account.

• Use a random password generator that tries and retries the password until it gets it right
• Installs spyware on your computer that tracks keystrokes
• Use phishing techniques, which is an email that appears to be from a service you belong to, such as Hotmail or PayPal, and tricks you into thinking you are logging into your actual account.
• Use fake time-out or re-login screen, which makes you think you need to re-login to your email account because it timed out, when really this is just a tricky html email.

These are just a few common ways. Hackers and online identity thieves are getting more and more creative on how to steal your identity and scam money online.

How Do I Avoid Being Scammed?

Here are some tips on preventing getting scammed online through your email account:

• If you are using a public computer, make sure the “remember me” feature is disabled
• Make sure you completely log out and close all browser windows on public computers
• Look at the “return path” or “reply to” address carefully on emails you receive
• Do not post your email address online where it is hot linked. If you want to leave your email address posted in a discussion board, put a space between the username and @ sign so spam bots do not find your address
• Change your password regularly
• Use more characters, symbols and numbers. Use other characters other than the ones found by using shift + a number key.
• Use a lengthy password, and do not use a word or phrase that can be found in a dictionary
• Do not use your login name as your password
• Contrary to popular belief, writing your passwords down and keeping them in a safe place is much more secure than storing them online in a document or with password storage software

What Do I Do if I am Scammed?

If someone breaks into your account, assume they have access to all of your information. This includes bank accounts, credit cards, anything with a login.

• Notify your email provider immediately so they can close your account or reset the password.
• Change all of your passwords for every other service and monitor those accounts for suspicious activity
• Contact everyone you know and tell them about the situation and to stop using that email address to contact you
• If fraudulent activity continues on your other accounts, file a police report and notify the respective service provider immediately

Millionaire Money Habit: Identity theft is a serious crime that continues to grow as web popularity and access is increasing around the world. You can help prevent the stress and losses that can occur from online identity theft by being aware and following some preventative steps. Don’t waste another moment keeping yourself vulnerable to email theft. Go make those passwords extra secure.