Better Financial Health in 15 Minutes (or less!)

Quarter-Four Checkup: Budgets, Benefits, and a Smarter Portfolio

• Stacey Hyde

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Year-end can either drain your wallet or sharpen your plan. We chose the latter and mapped out a clear, 15-minute money tune-up you can run before the holidays hit full speed. We start with practical steps to tame seasonal spending—set a simple gift cap, try a family name-draw, coordinate with grandparents, and lock in travel numbers—so December doesn’t turn into a last-minute splurge-fest. With your holiday budget set, we pivot to boosting savings the smart way: adjust 401(k) contributions after pay changes, consider Roth options for tax flexibility, and automate a Roth IRA so you’re not scrambling at tax time.

Markets have been strong, which makes rebalancing more important, not less. If large-cap growth has crept beyond your target, we explain how to trim gains and add to value or international to keep risk in check. Nearing retirement? Bonds aren’t just ballast anymore. With yields back, fixed income can provide income and act as a shock absorber when stocks get jittery. We share a practical guideline for increasing bond exposure as retirement approaches and how to tailor it to your timeline and withdrawals.

Open enrollment is your once-a-year chance to upgrade benefits. We break down the high-deductible health plan plus Health Savings Account combo, the triple tax advantages, and a strategy to invest HSA dollars for those expensive pre-Medicare years if you want to retire early. We also cover using up FSA balances on preventive care you might be delaying. To wrap, we streamline your financial footprint: consolidate old 401(k)s, reduce logins, and manage every account under one unified allocation so your portfolio works as a single, coherent plan.

If this helped you steady your year-end money plan, follow the show, share it with a friend who needs a nudge, and leave a quick review—tell us the first task you’re tackling today.

Envision Financial Planning. 5100 Poplar Avenue, Suite 2428, Memphis, TN 38137. (901) 422-7526. This communication is strictly intended for individuals residing in the United States. Advisory Services offered through Envision Financial Planning, a Registered Investment Adviser.

SPEAKER_00:

Hi, this is Stacy Hyde with Envision Financial Planning, and we're back for another episode of Better Financial Health in 15 Minutes or Less. And as we enter into, and we're kind of halfway through the first month of the fourth quarter, it's hard to believe. But we do need to start looking towards our year-in planning. And what do I mean by that? Well, we have Christmas coming up, we have Thanksgiving coming up, there may be travel involved in that. So we need to sit down and look at where we are, how much we have and savings or checking accounts to help pay for those sorts of things. Go ahead and do a budget for gifting so that you're not caught off guard and then doing kind of panic purchases at the last minute that almost always wind up costing too much and are not really probably what we wanted to get anyway. So really kind of sit down now and be deliberate about who you want to change gifts with. And if you've got a group that, you know, we did this years ago with our extended family, and we said, you know, nobody needs anything. Why don't we just maybe draw names? Because that'll be fun to open a gift, but then we only had to buy one gift for one person. And that was a lot more fun and I think a lot more meaningful to everyone. So do some stuff like that ahead of time if you've got young kids, kind of figure out, maybe talk to the grandparents about who's going to get what and spread out that cost. The other thing that you should be doing is take a look at what you're doing with your savings. Did you get a pay increase this year? Did you increase how much you're putting in your 401k plan? Did you intend to start a Roth IRA and you haven't done that yet? Yes, you have until you file your taxes next year, technically, to get that done for this year. But cash flow-wise, it's much easier for most of us to come up with$7,000 if we do a little bit at a time rather than going, oh, I need that all at once. Um, if you have access to a 401k, maybe you increase that 401k or start adding to the raw portion of your 401k. Um I think that's really, really important to just sort of assess where you are. It's also a good time because we're three months into the year, we're three quarters into the year, and it's been a great year in the markets, in spite of all the nuttiness that's gone on in our world. I think it's a really important time to look at your asset allocation. Because if you haven't looked at it for a while, then it's likely that your large cap US, particularly your large cap growth US stocks, have gotten to be a much bigger percentage of your allocation than maybe you had originally set them to. Well, that means that it's time to rebalance. It's the old sell high, buy low, buy some of the value stocks, maybe add to your international. Although international has been on a tear this year, it's actually finally getting some performance from our international stocks. So it's important to look at that and rebalance. And particularly as you get closer to retirement, you may want to add, or I would strongly encourage you to add some fixed income into your portfolio if you don't have it there already. Because unlike fixed income five years ago, when people were getting mortgage rates for under 3%, and the savings account, we were getting excited if we got 2% on it. Well, now bonds this year have earned 5-7%, depending on what kind they have. So you actually can get a nice return on a safer portion of your portfolio. And as you get closer to retirement, those bonds not only provide income, they act as a shock absorber to your portfolio, meaning that when stocks get crazy, generally speaking, bonds hold up better, especially now that they actually have yield, have return in and of themselves. And so a good rule of thumb is as you approach retirement, we would encourage most people to have about 40% of their portfolio in fixed income or bonds and money markets and cash. And pay attention to that. So you want to look and rebalance. You know, yes, it's hard to say, man, but I've earned 25% on my large cap growth stocks. Well, yes, but that's not always going to be the case. And rebalancing means that you are selling high and you're buying low, you're buying what's not done as well, so that you keep your portfolio in balance. And I think that that's something that's a really good idea to do this time of year. Um, while you're looking at your 401k contributions, getting ready for next year, that's a good thing to do. It's also open enrollment time, so it's time to make your benefit selections for next year. If you have an opportunity for a health plan that has a health savings account attached to it, really encourage you to look at that. The nice thing about a health savings account as opposed to a flexible spending account or FSA is you can put all the money in the HSA that'll save you federal taxes, FICA taxes, state taxes if you're in a state that charges them. The money goes in, tax deductible, comes out tax-free. But the real magic is you not using that money for health care, letting it grow. And then if you're one of the people we talk to all the time that really want to retire prior to reaching Medicare age, which is 65, if you're not disabled, then it gives you money that you can invest and tap that to use to pay for those years of healthcare coverage that you need before you're eligible for Medicare, which can be quite expensive. So it's a great way to get some extra savings going because those dollars do roll over year to year. Also, if you have a flexible spending account and you've still got balances in there, it's a good time to schedule all those preventative health things, your colonoscopy, your mammograms, um, all of those types of things that you may be overlooking and overdue for. So it's a good time to do that as well. Um, because those monies you have to use them up in the current calendar year. So those are just some good hygiene things that you want to look at. If you've got maybe an old 401k, go ahead and get that. In most cases, you you're gonna want to add it to your current 401k to where everything's together. You already have a rollover IRA, you want to combine it with that. You want to really streamline your life so that you don't have all these different logins that reduces the chances that you'll forget an account and overlook it years from now. And you do want to make sure that what the investments that you have in one spot make sense with investments you have in another spot. Because you are, even though you have separate accounts, you really should have an overarching investment policy that says this is what we want our allocation to be. So just take a few minutes before we get into the craziness that is the year and holidays. I think most people are coming back from fall break if they took that. Um, it's a good time before life gets too crazy and before you get too caught up in what you're going to be for Halloween, or you're already there and you're starting to have those parties and you're in a candy coma. But it's a good time to start looking at it and preparing for the end of the year so you're not caught off guard. Thanks for tuning in. This has been another episode of Better Financial Health in 15 minutes or less.