The daffodils are out. The clocks go forward soon. And all over the country, people are opening windows, sorting cupboards, and dragging bags to the charity shop.

Spring, it turns out, is a very good time to have a clear-out.

But I want to talk about a different kind of clutter this month. The kind that doesn’t sit in your spare bedroom. The kind that lives in the back of your mind at two in the morning, or in a pile of paperwork you keep meaning to get to.

Financial clutter. And most of us are carrying more of it than we realise.

Take Margaret. She’s in her fifties, runs a household on a careful budget, and juggles bills the way plate jugglers juggle plates! Always moving, never quite letting anything drop. She knows roughly what’s coming in. She’s less sure what’s going out. “I mean to sit down and go through it properly,” she told me. “But there’s always something else.”

There always is, isn’t there.

Then there’s Ron. Retired. Comfortable enough, but on a fixed income that doesn’t stretch the way it used to. Prices have gone up — we all know that — and Ron has quietly adjusted. Less of this, skip that, make do. But he’d never actually sat down and looked properly at what was going out each month. “I just assumed it was fine,” he said. “I didn’t want to find out it wasn’t.”

That sentence says everything.

And then there’s James — a professional with a good income who still feels permanently behind. That quiet, nagging sense that money is always slightly out of reach, something to sort out later. “I’ll deal with it when things calm down,” he said. They never do.

What all three of these people share isn’t a lack of money. It’s avoidance. A perfectly understandable, very human habit of putting off the things that feel uncomfortable — until they feel impossible.

Here’s what I’ve learned after years of working with people on their finances: avoidance is expensive. Not just in the obvious ways - the missed direct debits, the bills that could be reduced, the small leaks you’d fix immediately if only you knew they were there. It costs you in quieter ways too. It costs you peace of mind. It costs you sleep. It costs you the steady confidence that comes from simply knowing where you stand.

The good news? A spring clean doesn’t have to be a big operation.

You don’t need a weekend. You don’t need a spreadsheet. You don’t need to sort everything at once.

You need one hour. Maybe less. And you need to pick one financial task you’ve been avoiding.

Just one.

Margaret sat down one evening with a cup of tea and went through the household bills. Not to overhaul everything - just to look. She found a better energy tariff and cancelled a policy she’d forgotten she was still paying for. “I don’t know why I left it so long,” she said. They almost always say that, on the other side of it.

Ron checked his bank statements properly for the first time in months. He found two direct debits he didn’t recognise and a standing order for a service he’d stopped using over a year ago. Nothing catastrophic. Just quiet, unnecessary drain. The kind that’s easy to miss when you’re not looking. He cancelled them the same afternoon.

James started spending twenty minutes a week - just twenty minutes, actually paying attention to his money. Not obsessively. Not perfectly. Just consistently. The sense of scarcity that had followed him for years began, slowly, to ease.

None of these are dramatic stories. That’s rather the point.

Spring cleaning,  the financial kind, isn’t about revolution. It’s about attention. About deciding that money is not something you’ll deal with later, but something you’re willing to look at now.

So, here’s your task for this fortnight. Think of one financial thing you’ve been putting off. One bill you haven’t checked, one statement you haven’t opened, one call you’ve been meaning to make. Just one.

Write it down. And this week, do it.

The daffodils won’t last forever. But the relief of finally dealing with that one thing? That tends to stick around.