2 Gmail Features You Should Be Using to Better Manage Your Money

Have you used either of these before?

If you use Gmail for your email service, there are a lot of helpful features that can enable you to better manage various aspects of your life -- including your finances.

Many people don't really take the time to think about how they can set up their email for better money management, but there are some simple techniques you can implement that will help you do just that. Here are two of them.

1. Snooze emails

Chances are good you get emails sent to you that have to do with your finances. For example, you might get electronic credit card statements or an email alerting you to an opportunity to earn extra credit card perks for specific types of spending. You may even get some tax forms sent to you via email from lenders or brokerage accounts.

When these emails come in, they can easily get pushed to the bottom of your to-do list -- which can make filing taxes harder or cause you to forget to make payments. Fortunately, a Gmail feature can help you avoid that. You can "snooze" the email by clicking on it, selecting the little clock icon, and picking a time for it to pop back up.

When you snooze the email, you can pick a pre-selected or a custom time. At your chosen time, the email will pop back up to the top of your inbox. So, for example, you could choose to have your credit card statement pop back up on payday when you're going to pay it or on the day after your autopay should have been processed so you can check and make sure the payment went through as planned.

2. Gmail filtering

Gmail allows you to filter emails you have coming in. For example, you can direct an email from a particular sender to skip your inbox and go directly into a specific folder or label you have created.

This feature can easily be used to make sure you're only seeing promotional emails from stores when you want to. For example, let's say you have a store you like to shop at and you want to sign up for coupons from that store. You may not want to see every coupon that comes in because that might just tempt you to shop when you don't want to. But you may want those promotional emails available so when you do go shopping at the store, you can access a coupon to help you save.

With Gmail filtering, you can arrange to have all of your promotional emails filtered into a special folder that you only open when you want to -- rather than showing up in your inbox. You can do this by setting up the filter for particular senders, but there's an easier way. You can add full stops to your email address by using the "+" sign and a descriptive word.

So, if your email was [email protected], every time you signed up for a promotional email from a store, you could enter your email on the store's website as [email protected]. You'd still receive all those emails, but you could set up a filter so they all go into a special folder you only access when needed.

These two features can make a big difference in helping you spend less and stay on top of money deadlines, so they're worth making use of if you're a Gmail user.