If you're not careful, your finances can quickly become unmanageable. What to do?

1. Make mutual funds the core of your portfolio, so that you don't have to keep tabs on a host of individual stocks and bonds.

2. "Rather than giving money to every charity that comes knocking, pick a couple of charities each year and give them a healthy sum," suggest Ross Levin, a financial planner in Minneapolis. "That way, it's easier to track your charitable giving" for tax purposes.

3. Keep all your investments at one brokerage firm or mutual-fund company.

4. Avoid nondeductible contributions to your individual retirement account, thereby saving yourself from a lifetime of paperwork hassles.

5. Maintain just one money-market fund, brokerage account, checking account and credit card.

6. "Everybody is inundated with information, so it's easy to forget what's important," says John Cammack, a financial planner with Baltimore's T. Rowe Price Associates. "Twice a year, write down your investment goals and what strategy you will use to reach them. That will simplify your focus."

7. When you bail out of a stock or mutual fund in your taxable account, sell all your shares at once, so that it's easier to calculate your taxable gain or loss.

8. Consider index funds, which simply buy the stocks that constitute a market index in an effort to match the index's performance. With index funds, you never have to sell because the manager quits or the fund badly lags behind the market.

9. If you buy a vacation property in another state, put it in a revocable living trust, so that your estate won't end up going through probate in two different states.

10. Make an inventory of your household possessions, possibly using a camera or camcorder, and keep it at the office or in your safe-deposit box. This inventory will bolster your insurance claim should your home be burgled or burn down.

11. Keep good financial records.

12. If your heirs are likely to owe estate taxes on your assets, try side- stepping the problem by giving away money now. Each year, you can give $10,000 to any other person without triggering the gift tax.

13. Use just one insurance agent and just one financial adviser.

14. Rather than owning everything jointly with your spouse, consider holding at least some assets separately. That will make it easier to set up a "bypass" trust, a common estate-planning tool that allows both you and your spouse to make full use of an exemption that permits $600,000 in every estate to pass free of federal estate taxes.

Also, don't own assets jointly with your children. Why not? You may short-change your other heirs, who could end up paying disproportionate share of the estate taxes owed upon your death, says Jeffrey Cohen, an estate and financial planner in Elmsford, N.Y.

15. Try to confine your securities trading to a tax-deferred retirement plan. That way, you won't have to list your sales - and the resulting gains and losses - on next April's tax return.

16. Don't invest in your child's name. Yeah, you get a modest tax break. But you lose control of the money, you could wreck your family's chances or college-financial aid and you may end up filing a tax return for your kid.

17. Write a letter of instructions, which spells out your funeral wishes, lists your financial accounts and specifies where your will, tax returns and other key papers can be found.

18. "If you create a durable power of attorney today, it could make life a lot simpler if you or your spouse become incapacitated," says Richard Kohan, an estate-planning expert with Price Waterhouse. A durable power of attorney allows somebody to make financial decisions on your behalf. Mr. Kohan also advises drawing up a living will, to detail your wishes concerning life-prolonging medical procedures, and a health-care power of attorney, naming somebody to make medical decisions if you can't. .