New Year, New Finances
The New Year is a perfect time to reevaluate your financial goals. It’s easy to get stuck in similar spending habits and difficult to start allocating time and money towards new goals without a plan. Start the new year by creating a list of financial resolutions you want to accomplish this year. These goals can be as small as spending less on coffee or as large as fully committing a portion of your pay checks to a retirement or emergency fund. We’ve created five financial resolutions that everyone should consider for their own financial New Year resolutions.
1. Start Investing
Investing is incredibly important for your long-term financial well-being. Whether you’re investing in retirement accounts, emergency funds, or stocks the shared goal is to achieve long-term security. It’s often hard to consider long-term goals in the short term, which makes now the perfect time to jumpstart your investing journey. Don’t be afraid to reach out to financial experts to help you understand how and when to invest your money. Investing is an essential financial tool for achieving long-term financial well-being. This is your sign to commit to investing this year!
2. Change Spending Habits
Spending habits are hard to break, but easy to fall into. By setting new financial goals to adopt different spending habits you’ll see success in your short-term and long-term finances. Make a list of things you consistently spend money on. Non-essential costs like eating out, excessive shopping, and excessive traveling are easy to cut back on when you give yourself a goal to cut overall spending. Try limiting spending on non-essential costs. For example, if you eat out three to four days a week, try limiting it to one day a week. Change starts small but can eventually have a big effect on your overall financial well-being.
3. Find a Side Hustle
The New Year is a great time to start thinking about finding a side hustle or finding ways to create extra channels of income. Finding a side hustle that makes sense for you depends on what interests you. If you’re looking for a side hustle, you probably already have a job and want to find something fun and proactive on the side. Things like photography, tutoring, renting extra rooms, reselling thrifted items, dog sitting, teaching music lessons, proof reading, helping with snow/lawn care, and delivering food are all popular side hustles that can create a worthy channel of extra income. What type of side hustle makes the most sense for you?
4. Reevaluate Expenses & Subscriptions
In the digital realm of payments and subscriptions, it’s easy to lose track of what you’re paying for. As the New Year begins, use this time to reevaluate your payments and subscriptions to decide if you really need them. Get a hold of your payment history and make a list of all your subscriptions and monthly expenses. Ask yourself if you really need to keep paying for cable, the five streaming services, the premium internet service, or whatever extra services and subscriptions you’re paying for. During this process it’s not uncommon to find completely unused services or subscriptions that you forgot you were paying for.
5. Expand Your Financial Literacy
Learning more about finances is the best way to support your financial future. By investing in your knowledge, you’ll set yourself up for successful planning and decision-making. There are lots of resources out there to help you expand your financial literacy. At Firefighters Credit Union we are committed to educating consumers on their finances to set them up for success. Visit our blogs page for informative financial information as well as our Ask the Money Man videos where we answer frequently asked financial questions.
What Are Your Financial Goals?
Before creating your financial resolutions, you need to uncover your short-term and long-term financial goals. Take the time to consider what you want to accomplish with your actions this year to best support your goals. If you’re looking for guidance in creating or executing your financial goals, contact us at Firefighters Credit Union with locations in La Crosse, Onalaska, and Holmen. Take charge of your finances today and make this year count!
