3 financial new year’s gifts you can give to yourself right now 🎁
People love making financial goals for the new year.
“Save more.”
“Spend less.”
“Invest more.”
Cue mid-February: no progress towards goals.
To be fair, if you’re making any sort of financial goals in the new year, good for you for even thinking about it. According to Sallie Krawcheck at Ellevest, 61% of women would rather talk about their own death than money. Yikes! So these ARE good goals to be thinking about, but they’re so lofty. How are you making sure you’re doing them?
Today I’m sharing three financial new year’s gifts that you can give to yourself RIGHT NOW.
Backtrack and do a spending staredown for at least one month (preferably a few to notice trends). Not sure what that means? Check out this post for a detailed how-to-staredown your own spending. Tackling financial goals is almost impossible if you don’t know what you’re spending. It’s momentarily intimidating but long-term rewarding and clarifying. Do it yourself with these instructions or sign up to do one with me! I love helping women get clear on their spending patterns in a totally shame-free way.
Find out the interest rate on your savings account. For over ten years, all my savings sat in an extremely low-interest savings account (I basically earned a dollar a year in interest because my rate was just .05%). If your account is less than 1%, get your savings into a higher-yield savings account asap. There is NO reason your money should be sitting in savings doing literally nothing. Rates fluctuate, but right now it’s entirely possible to find a bank that gives you a rate of at least 1.5% (this means your savings account will earn 1.5% interest each year). To switch is free in most cases and takes very little time.
Sign up with a robo-advisor to make a recurring investment in the stock market (no, you don’t need to wait until you’re an expert on the stock market — news flash, you don’t HAVE to be!). For two years, I made my recurring investment using Betterment (which was an awesome place to start). In the new year I switched over to Ellevest — a robo-advised investment platform focused specifically on women with an emphasis on socially responsible investing. Start as small as you want — put in $5 a month if that’s what feels comfortable to you. Just start building the habit. Money in the stock market, over time, compounds and grows at a historically much higher rate (around 7% over time) than money in a savings account.
