I’m already starting to see it in the gym – the number of people who are there in the mornings when I am have dropped back down to pre-New Year levels. The week of January 6th was packed (more than in previous years it seems like) but the number of people have continued to dwindle week-by-week since then. According to US News, 80-something percent of people who set New Year’s resolutions give up by the second week of February. We’re not quite there yet, but I can already see the difference.
If you’re one of the people who made New Year’s resolutions to make your personal finances better in 2020 and you’ve already hopped off the wagon, then here’s a good opportunity for you to hop back on. Trying to achieve a new goal can be frustrating and many times I think that’s because we haven’t set a clear path for how we’re going to get there, we haven’t put a system in place to achieve the goal, and we think of the big picture goal that we want to accomplish instead of the small steps that it will take to get there.
I want to help make achieving financial goals easier and help others make their personal financial lives better, which is why I gave 5 simple tasks at the beginning of the year that you can do to get some wins under your belt and create momentum and why I’m going to give 5 more here today.
Even though some of the tasks that I wrote about in January may not seem extremely significant, continuing to get these smaller wins will add up to significant accomplishments. If you can continue to find 5 more things to improve on each month throughout 2020, then you’ll have made a ton of cumulative progress throughout the year, no matter how small each individual win may be.
5 Easy Personal Finance Wins for the New Year
If you’ve been following along since the beginning of the year, then you should have made some good financial progress already in 2020. Here’s what you should have accomplished over the past month:
- Check your credit report & create a monitoring schedule
- Freeze your credit reports
- Increase your retirement savings contributions by 1%
- Increase your automatic payments on your high interest rate debt
- Setup automatic payments and online bill pay
In addition to those 5 tasks, I wanted to help provide some clarity around the 3 most common financial resolutions: How to stick to a budget, paying down debt, and saving more money. I gave some of my thoughts on how to think about each of these three different goals as well as how you can start putting systems in place to help you be successful in accomplishing them.
5 More Personal Finance Wins
Here are 5 more wins to keep the momentum going in 2020:
1. Find and/or create the login information to all of your accounts
Hopefully this is something that you’ve already done and that you can check off the list and move on. However, I’ve found that a lot of people have either never set up online access to their financial accounts or have no idea how to login to them.
Having online access to your financial accounts should provide you peace of mind because it means that you’re making progress and becoming more organized, you can review the accounts and track your net worth, and you’re the one who is in control of the login information rather than someone who figured out to create login information to your account to steal your personal information.
2. Check your beneficiary information and make sure that it’s up-to-date
A lot of times people will name their beneficiaries on their financial accounts when they open the account and then never check it again or they won’t designate beneficiaries at all. A beneficiary is someone who will receive your money when you pass away. You can name a primary beneficiary (usually a spouse, if you’re married, or a close family member) as well as contingent beneficiaries (who would get the money if the primary beneficiary weren’t living).
If you have beneficiaries in place for your financial accounts, then you can login and check that the information is still correct. If you don’t have your beneficiaries setup it’s something that only take a couple of minutes to do with many financial institutions.
3. Securely store your login information
Since you’ve gotten all of your online financial accounts setup you’ll need to store the login information in a secure place. I’m not a technology or security expert by any means, but some options you might consider are using a password manager like LastPass, allowing your browser to store your information (Google Chrome will save login information to your Google account), and setting up two-step verification on your accounts where you have a code texted or emailed to you each time you login that you must enter before you can access the account. (Yes, two-step verification can be a pain, but it’s worth it so that someone doesn’t get into your account and commit fraud.)
It’s also worth checking the emails and phone numbers on file within your accounts to make sure you recognize them. It also might make sense to make sure that your spouse or someone else who you trust knows how to find all of your login information in case something were to happen to you. Digital asset planning is becoming way more important in our digital world, but it’s something that I don’t think a lot of people are taking seriously yet. Please keep in mind that this information safeguards against a lot of your personal information. Take it seriously.
4. Close old accounts
Closing old accounts that you don’t use anymore and that don’t have a balance can be another way to help protect you against any wrongdoing. If an account doesn’t have a balance and you haven’t used it in years, then there’s no reason to have it open. It’s just another part of your life that someone could potentially hack into and get access to your personal information. Closing old accounts probably doesn’t sound fun but it should be pretty easy to accomplish.
5. Create a net worth statement
Since you’ve gotten all of your financial account login information squared away you can go through the process of creating a basic net worth statement. I track my net worth on the last day of each month because I think it’s the best way to see overall financial progress. If you have no idea what this means, then you can read more about tracking your net worth here and find a simple net worth template within Excel to help get you started.
