As you resolve to exercise more or boost your career, don’t forget about your finances. Here are 10 financial tips to help you achieve your financial goals:
- Check Your Credit: Visit annualcreditreport.com for a free annual credit report. Look for duplicate accounts, incorrect information, and other errors. Then, fix any mistakes to help boost your overall credit score.
- Button-up Your Budget: Take a long, hard look at all of your expenses. Eliminate any streaming services you don’t use and consider ways to cut costs on utilities (shortening showers by five minutes can save a lot of money every year). Then put those savings toward outstanding debt or savings.
- Reduce Your Debt: Pay what you can toward your loans using the snowball method. This entails going from the smallest loan to the largest. Simply make the minimum payment on every loan except the smallest. Pay as much as you can toward that loan until it’s paid off. Then repeat the process until you are debt-free.
- Find Better Rates: Shop around for lower rates on loans, higher rates on savings, and lower costs on your insurance policies (car, home, life). With TruStage life and auto insurance those savings can add up quickly.
- Start an Emergency Account (or add to it): Imagine having three to six months of your household wages in savings for those unexpected life moments. To start yours, simply set up a percentage of every paycheck to automatically transfer into a special Transportation FCU savings account. Let it keep growing until you’ve hit your magic number. Then, only use the money for emergencies.
- Write Your Will: Simply having a will means your family won’t have to argue about who gets what. This can save a lot of money in legal fees, which can reduce the value of your estate.
- Take a Look at Your Withholdings: Adjust yours using the IRS Tax Withholding Estimator. This tool can help you keep more of your money now instead of getting a refund from the IRS every year.
- Pay Yourself Every Month: Treat your personal savings like a monthly utility bill. Set up automatic “payments” to various savings accounts for a vacation, day at the spa, or whatever.
- Let Your Employer Boost Your Retirement Savings: If your employer has a matching retirement plan, maximize the opportunity as much as possible.
- Shred Your Paper Trail: Yes, you do need to hang onto certain documents for several years, but overall you can shred papers that contain personal information. For reference, you only need to keep your medical, financial, and retirement statements for six years. And you should keep six years of your tax records.
We are Here to Help Map Out Your Financial Destination
Jumpstart your 2024 financial fitness goals and sign up for our Lunch N’ Learn Financial Wellness Webinars January 8- 12 from 12 pm to 1 pm. Learn more and save your spot! Link to be created
