While you’re freshening up your home, consider ways to also tidy up your finances. You may be surprised at what’s hiding in your accounts and inboxes, financial documents and tax returns.

1. Clean Up Your Accounts
Consider consolidating your accounts into one relationship to gain a clearer understanding of your financial streams and overall wealth. Or, if you prefer to maintain accounts with different banks, take advantage of digital tools that let you see all of your accounts in one place. Getting that full picture can bring fresh perspective about what you need to prioritize, as you manage day-to-day cash needs and pursue your longer-term goals.

2. Declutter Your Debt
Do you ever feel like your debt is in disarray? If you have multiple loans and credit cards, with different interest rates and payment dates, it might be time to consider debt consolidation. Paying off your various debts via a single loan with a competitive interest rate not only helps you save money, it also leaves you with one simple payment date each month. This, in turn, may help reduce financial stress.

3. Toss Out (Some) Paper
As for existing paper records, many institutions will allow you to upload important documents into a secure digital vault. Once you have a digital copy, you can generally shred the paper one. Records you should definitely keep (digitally if possible, but paper records if not) include the past seven years of tax documents and any documents related to still-active loans.

4. Organize Your Income and Expenses
With a clearer picture of your budget, you can more carefully track how much you are saving for near-term goals, such as buying a home, as well as long-term goals, such as retiring by a certain age. Consider using digital tools that allow you to set budget goals for each spending category and alert you when you have met your monthly goal or may be close to exceeding the amount.

5. Plan for Future Tax Seasons
Consider a combination of the following strategies: Tax-loss harvesting: Involves selling securities at a loss to help offset taxes owed from capital gains in taxable investment accounts. Tax-aware asset allocation: Different kinds of accounts are taxed differently. A tax-aware asset allocation strategy that accounts for those differences may help to increase after-tax returns. Tax-favorable investments: Many investments, such as municipal bonds, tax-efficient mutual funds and 529 plans, may allow you to save for a variety of goals while also offering tax benefits.

As uniquely troubling as the current market sell-off has been, at least one feature feels familiar to me: The effort to convince investors to avoid the serious investing mistakes that come from short-term thinking during a sell-off.

1. They panic-sell.
It can be gut-wrenching to see your investment portfolio or the retirement plan that you’ve been building for years take a sudden dive. The urge to staunch the bleeding can be overwhelming—to salvage what you can and wait for the dust to settle. Ironically, this can be the single most damaging thing an investor can do.
If you don’t need cash right away and have a well-researched, diversified portfolio, realize that downturns ultimately are temporary. The market may sometimes feel like it could go to zero, but market history shows that rebounds can return many portfolios to the black in just a few years.

2. They go to cash and stay there
Investors who have more cash than their long-term strategy calls for because they sold during the market slide, or for any other reason, should look to close that gap and get invested. Dollar-cost averaging, a method where you buy set amounts of stock at regular intervals (say, monthly) to get back into the market gradually, can be a good way to get there.

3. They are overconfident and make poor choices.
Overconfident investors tend to think they know better than even professional investors what’s going on in markets and can make all the right moves to avoid losses and lock in bargains. They can drive themselves to distraction and end up with a portfolio in disarray and even deeper losses.
In times of market uncertainty, you don’t have to figure out what to do next on your own. Find a Financial Advisor you trust to go through your portfolio with you and help you understand how best to proceed, based on your time horizon and risk tolerance.

4. They dig a deeper hole trying to make up for losses or bad choices.
It is common for investors to loathe the idea of selling an investment at a loss, or below the high water mark. This can cause them to hang onto losers too long because they believe those stocks will rise again and to sell winners too early because they worry those stocks will decline—what is known in behavioral finance research as the “disposition effect.”
Proactively take advantage of current opportunities, which can often run counter to those instincts. For example, if losses arise in a taxable investment account, “harvesting” them by selling those positions can improve long-term tax efficiency.