Save more money. That was the most popular New Year’s resolution in 2025 and the second most popular in 2026, according to Statista.
There’s a difference between making a resolution and acting on it, however. Get on your path to better financial health by taking care of some routine personal finance tasks. Right now at the beginning of the year—after the holiday crunch and before tax season, when you’re planning your annual travel and expenses—is a great time to do it.
1. Start Budgeting
If you already budget your money, the beginning of a new year is a great time to review last year’s spending and consider where you want your money to go in the months ahead.
If you want to start budgeting for the first time, I recommend using a personal finance app for it. Apps that specialize in budgeting make the job more efficient and more accurate than doing it on paper. The reason is that they use your spending history rather than guesswork. They look back at the past few months of transactions across your credit cards, Venmo, checking account, and other financial accounts and classify every dollar you spent into categories. The result is a clear picture of how you typically spend your money, which gives you a realistic starting point for creating budgets.
Apps such as Copilot Money, YNAB (both recommended by WIRED), and Quicken Simplifi (similar but costs less) do much of this work for you. If you want to reduce your spending on, say, restaurants or entertainment, the app tracks your spending in real time and warns you as you get close to the limit you set. That way you can make smart decisions before you blow your budget.
2. Max Out Your IRA
I’m not a financial expert, and this is not financial advice. That said, many reputable financial resources say maxing out your annual IRA contribution as early as possible each year ensures you reap the full benefits of compounding interest.
For 2026, the limit on annual contributions has increased to $7,500 for people younger than 50, according to the IRS. If you’re 50 or older, the maximum is $8,600. These limits are decreased and phased out if you earn more than a certain amount for the year.
If you can’t afford to move the maximum amount of cash, you can always do what you can now and plan to contribute more later in the year. Additionally, if you didn’t max out your 2025 contribution, there’s still time. You have until the unextended tax filing deadline (April 15 most years) to contribute up to a total of $7,000 if you’re younger than 50 or $8,000 if you’re 50 and older.
3. Adjust Your Retirement and Savings Plans
Set-it-and-forget-it retirement savings? In this economy? Take a good look at all your retirement accounts and any special savings plans you have, like a 529 plan, and adjust them as you see fit. Employer-sponsored retirement accounts sometimes come with tools in the online portals that guide you to making appropriate adjustments based on changes to your household income, planned retirement age, risk tolerance, and other factors.
Decisions you might have made about these accounts when you were 28 might not be the same decision you want when you’re 45. Looking over them at least annually will help you stay on track.
4. Check Your Credit Report
A credit report is a history of your financial accounts and a way to gauge your financial responsibility. It lists accounts you’ve opened and closed, how long they were open, the balances on current accounts, whether you’ve missed payments or made late payments, foreclosures in your name, and so forth.
Checking your credit report is a security task as much as a finance task. If someone uses your identity to open a line of credit, the new account will appear on your credit report. Finding evidence of fraud early can be the difference between stopping it in its tracks versus finding yourself in debt that you never created.
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