127- Quick Wins To Start 2026

Fear not money nerds, this isn't a generic run through of the dreaded financial new year's resolutions. Nobody ever sticks to those anyway. 

Financial planning is dull and sticky, and you want low effort, maximum reward steps to improve your financial picture. 

This episode should provide you with all you want and more. 

Benjamin summarises the easy steps you can take to power your financial plan, without you needing to even leave the comfort of your sofa. What could be better than that?!

Join Benjamin Mitchell (themoneyscot), serial hater of financial jargon, as he helps make your finances clearer and ensures you never make another financial mistake.

Getting on top of your personal finances doesn't need to be complicated or scary. Arm yourself with the only knowledge you need to transform yourself from money novice to money nerd! 

Take my 5 minute retirement assessment (can you already afford to retire?) 🚀


Disclaimer - please note that nothing in this podcast can be relied upon as financial advice and the content is provided purely for information and guidance purposes. Please seek independent, regulated financial advice relevant to your situation.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Hi, money nerds, and welcome to Heads Up on Money. This is your first personal finance Friday of 2026. Did we all have a great Christmas? Did we all manage to avoid killing our families? Have you got any idea what day of the week it is? Do you know what time of day it is? It's time to get back into some form of routine, which for people like me I really enjoy. Don't get me wrong, it was a great break over the Christmas period. It was great to down tools, to switch off, to log off, and focus on the important things in life, which, as I've talked about endlessly and bored you with endlessly on the podcast, is what money is for at the end of the day, and why we do this thing of wealth and financial planning is ultimately so you've got more control over your time to do with as you wish and spend with as you wish. So we're moving on into 2026, and this is not going to be your usual 2026 new year bucket list, new year, new me with my finances, all of that BS. Because be honest, it doesn't stick. I've had countless meetings over the years with clients, and we've talked about new plans we're going to implement in 2026 or whatever the year may have been, and they fall by the wayside because they become intentions and little more. Let's be honest, financial planning is a sinfully dull exercise, and it's the same reason why your financial planning resolutions fall by the wayside in the same way that your banning of alcohol resolutions, your no chocolate resolutions, your I'm going to go to the gym more resolution, they all fall by the wayside also because it's pretty dull stuff and it's hard to stick to the plan. So I'm not going to be a hypocrite and talk about the things you can do to your financial plan to kickstart 2026 and make this year the most positive it's ever been. Oh, I just cannot stand that that bullshit. Let's call it what it is. So we're going to get into in this episode the little wins you can do with your financial planning as we start the new calendar year. The things that do not take much effort, that you can often do while you're still sitting on the sofa eating the very bottom dregs of the quality street tin as you've got the toffee pennies stuck in your teeth as you're refreshing your pension nomination beneficiaries. This is stuff you can do, folks, without leaving the comfort of your armchair. And I'm going to try and rattle through a list of them because they are short and sweet by their very nature, because they are easy to implement. And I hope even if you've just taken one of these away from my rambles today, then that will have been a good deed. Well done in the start of 2026. So let's get into this one. Heads up on money, episode 127, I believe, is what we're on. Absolute madness, as always. But as always, folks, if you are enjoying the podcast and you're getting value from it, please do leave me a comment, like, subscribe to the show, share it with your family and friends. Doing all this stuff feeds the lovely algorithm that keeps the podcast high up on the personal finance podcasts, and it makes sure we get the money messages I'm trying to give to you, to more people every week, because as I say, people need to do this stuff themselves. Nobody else will have your financial future for you. So the more people we can financially empower and educate, the better. Okay, that's my request from you. Now it's time for me to get into the easy wins you can do this January. First of all, I've talked about this one before, but you probably have a workplace pension if you're still working, that is, of course. And this may be a defined contribution pension where you build up a pot of money and the onus is on you to choose a suitable investment strategy within that pot, with the objective being you grow this pot of money to the point when you can and when you choose to retire and draw down upon the money. You may have a defined benefit pension less common nowadays. They may have once been a final salary scheme, sometimes they're brought forward now into what's called career average schemes because they're less cost intensive on the employer, but with a defined benefit scheme, you've got less control over them and you get guaranteed income for the rest of your days when you retire. So I'm parking defined benefit schemes. My easy win is calling out the people who own a defined contribution pension scheme, is you should be reviewing the fund that your workplace pension is currently enrolled into. It's highly probable, unless you made a conscious effort to change this, that you will be in a middle of the road fund, often termed a balanced or medium risk fund, which may or may not be suitable for your long-term financial plan strategy. Now, not giving financial advice here as always, but the reality is that if you are investing over a long period of time, which applies to most people in reality, because even if you are in the accumulation stage of your wealth and you're building up your pension for retirement, you by the very nature of that will have a long investment time frame. And as I've talked about before in the podcast, even when you flick the switch and go from accumulation to decumulation or from approaching retirement to retirement, you still have a long investment time frame ahead of you. The nature of investing, compounding, and delivering long-term growth by investing in the right asset classes, in other words, equities, doesn't abandon you when you retire. You hopefully still have multi-decades of investment growth opportunity ahead of you. So for most people, they should be in a decent growth fund. And I'm careful with my wording there because if I say higher risk fund, people think, oh no, risk, that's a bad thing. But reframe it. You want a higher growth potential fund. And you accept there will be some shorter term volatility. There'll be times when things do not look quite so rosy, but over the long periods of time, blah blah blah, I've talked about it before, the downsides will become irrelevant. So the easy call for you to action today is look at your workplace pension. Log into your workplace pension portal. This is easier to do now than it's ever been. Your employer or your pension scheme should have given you details of how to set up an online account within your workplace pension, review the pension fund that you're in, question is that an appropriate fund for you? Is the fund expensive? Often in workplace pension schemes they won't be, but remember as I've educated you before, there are typically two types, two flavors of investment fund. There will be active funds and there will be passive funds. Active sounds sexier, it sounds better because they're trying to outperform the market. All you're doing there is paying the retirements of the fund managers that are running those funds. If you can do so, money nerds, avoid them at all costs, recognize that they are marketing guys who are addressing themselves as investment professionals. In reality, you just need to be leveraging the power of investment compounding and capitalism and letting markets do their thing. So often passive funds will do the job at a fraction of the cost and a lot better. There's a scarcity of active funds that beat passive funds and an even fewer amount that beat them consistently year on year. It's so common that the active funds that are star fund managers in one year will be down to the terrible bottom quartile of returns the following year, which gives us the evidence that it is all conjecture, it is all luck. Don't roll the dice when it comes to your retirement planning, just use markets in the best way that they can create for your financial future, which I strongly believe is using passive coattail investing. So review your workplace pension fund, make sure you're in an appropriate fund. Are you aware if it's active or passive? Are you aware what the equity content is within it? And are you aware what charges you're paying for that fund? And if you're not happy with all of these things, make the switch. Because if you just do that today, when we're talking about multi-decade returns, it's it's it's so significant. I cannot emphasize this enough money, nerds. So take the time, I beg of you. If you're feeling pinched and you cannot be affording to invest more to your ISUS, to your pensions, to your investment accounts, wherever it might be, go through your banking app, go through your monthly budgeting, and really ask yourself: do you need all of those subscriptions? There must be something there that is surplus to requirements, and often or not, a subscription you've forgotten existed, or an auto-renew that you forgot was in place. Take the time just to go through your last few months of your transactions and question what is that? Am I getting a material benefit from that? Is that something that's delivering me current joy? If so, great, go for it, really important. If it's not, and I'm spending it a waste of money each month, or I'm doing it to keep up with the Joneses, to maintain Lime Lifestyle when lifestyle creep has taken over, consider switching it off and using that money to better effect by increasing your pension contributions, increasing your ISA contributions, whatever it might be. And obviously be mindful of the tax restrictions on doing that. Both pensions and ISAS have a cap on how much you can pay into them in any one tax year. But keeping it simplistic, guys, for this opening episode of Heads Up on Money for 2026, just review your outgoings and consider could you be using things to better effect. And that leads me on to my third point is if you currently are doing good things and investing regularly every month to your investments, to your pensions, which is great, great planning, and I really commend you if you are doing that, pay yourself first every month, spend what's left after saving, not the other way around, all that good stuff that I talk about every month. Well, question is there scope for me to increase that? Is the current level the level it's been set at for a number of years? And if that is the case, then you should be nudging up your contribution levels every year, not only to keep pace with the terminator of wealth that is inflation, but also because it's going to compound over time and could mean the difference over long periods of time between you retiring at 58 versus 60. It really can make a difference with the snowball compounding effect of investment returns. And I always say to clients and people who are reaching out on the podcast alike, is that how much should you be contributing? What's the suitable amount to be paying into your investments every month? I can't really say without looking at your financial plan, but generally speaking, it should feel a little bit uncomfortable every month. You should feel a little bit squeezed, you should feel like that's a little bit of a push every month. Because if it's not, then it's not enough. And if it's not, then it's just more disposable income. You're going to park to needless, endless subscriptions to TV streaming services when you've got three already and you don't need a fourth, let's be honest. So review how much you're paying into your investment pots. This can be cash pots similarly. If you're building up cash reserves for a known expenditure need that's cropping up in the next year or two years, that's also very, very productive. But review those amounts, nudge them up because over time the little differences you're making today will compound to massive differences in the future. Another low-hanging fruit is if you have an investment portfolio and currently receive dividends from that portfolio. So for instance, if the individual funds or shares, if you hold individual shares, which broadly speaking you should not see previous episodes of the podcast around the diversification principles of investing. But if you own shares or funds and they pay an income out to you, perhaps that income is accruing within the wrapper itself. So what I mean by that is they're paying income within the funds, and that is just sitting in cash within the wrappers you hold. You're not actually receiving that income. Perhaps maybe you are receiving that income, but you don't actually need it. It's just being paid to your bank account every month and it's become habitual. It's a nice to have, you don't really need it, but hey, it's a dividend. I'm doing well this month. Really consider switching that to accumulation share classes of the funds that you hold. Because that means that the money that's paid out or would have been paid out doesn't get paid out, but instead gets thrown back into the mix and buys you more units of the funds that you hold. And again, this contributes massively to the snowball effect, far more so than having the income paid out, because you're getting the income paid back in, which is contributing to more units, and you're also getting capital growth in the value of those units. And this is how small amounts compound to massive amounts over time. So if you don't need the income that's being paid to you from your share portfolio, or hopefully, if you've done the right things and you've diversified and you've recognized the limitations of your own abilities and you hold funds instead of shares, don't have that income paid out to you or paid into the wrapper itself if you do not need it, because it should be considered to be put into accumulation units or have the money reinvested every month so that you can grow the portfolio for a time when you actually do need that capital. Next one is a short one, very sweet. Don't need to get up off your chair, folks. Just listen to what I'm saying here. Log into your online pension. You probably did this earlier if you listened to me in the first step. And look at your pension nominations. Are they accurate? Do they reflect your current wishes? Are you still happy to go to those people in the shares you have outlined? Remember, common misconception, folks, is that your pension is not dealt with within your will. You need a separate nomination form to be attached to your pension so that the pension scheme administrators know who you want that wealth to go to. They ultimately have discretion, so they are guided by your wishes. So for goodness sake, make your wishes known. It's a really, really quick, really simple planning exercise to do that you can do probably in the time between me having started this sentence and ended it. So action that now. And while I'm on the subject of tidying up your kind of administrative affairs, have a look at your will. Do you currently have a will in place? When was this last set up? Was it 190 cake? The saying we have here in Scotland, many years ago, totally irrelevant now. Have you had a significant life transition event since then? Have you got married? Have you got divorced? Have you bought a house? Have you had children? These are often triggers to speak with a solicitor to review your will. It's so, so important. Lots of people they start at the end, they start dabbling in the stock market, they start doing clever things with inheritance tax planning, but you'd be amazed at the amount of people who don't have the foundations in place, and having a will, and more importantly, one that is accurate and up to date and reflective of your current wishes is so so important. And another one, slightly more effort but incredibly high reward, and would really encourage you to start thinking about it, folks, is review your protection affairs. So if you have insurance policies in place that perhaps were taken out to cover a mortgage, cover the death of you or your partner, perhaps you've taken out out for inheritance tax planning reasons, so that there's a pot of money there with which your beneficiaries can use to clear any inheritance tax charge that may be liable on your estate on your passing. Well, you've probably done 90% of the work and you've given yourself a massive pat on the back because you think, yeah, I'm I'm doing well. I've got my my protection plan in place, there's going to be a pot left over for my husband, my wife, my kids. There's going to be a pot left over for my beneficiaries. I am sitting pretty, Benjamin. Well, you're 90% of the way there, but you're not the full way there, because often you should be considering using a trust within your protection policy, because that provides added protection and allows the beneficiaries or the recipients to get their hands on the money much quicker than if it goes through your estate. And of course, with a taxation lens and my taxation cap on, is it can provide massive tax savings because people who take out life insurance products with the aim of avoiding inheritance tax or using the proceeds to clear their inheritance tax liability, if it's not written on trust, it can go back into your estate, exacerbating the very inheritance tax liability that you've taken the policy out to avoid. So the key point here is trusts are not necessarily suitable for everyone. You need to take care of course and set it up in the right way, but it doesn't need to involve a solicitor, it doesn't need to be expensive. Speak to your life insurance provider. They will often have what's called off-the-shelf trust forms that they use that allow you to place your policy under trust. Generally speaking, discretionary trusts are more beneficial for most people because they have discretion and you can change them in the future. Perhaps if children come along or if you remarry, you can amend things with them. Whereas a bear trust is more restrictive in that the original beneficiaries you outline are set in stone for the duration. So generally speaking, discretionary trusts will be what most people use. You nominate under that discretionary trust who you want the proceeds to go to, who you want to manage the trust, which is what trustees are. It's not as onerous or complicated as it sounds, it's very simple. And what this basically allows you to do is to get the money to the right people at the right time in a more tax-efficient way. So look into this. I've done previous episodes of the podcast on this very subject. So do a deeper dive on those. But a key point here is if you're sitting on the couch on this Friday listening to my tone and thinking, you know, I've got protection products in place and they're they're there for the exact reasons we wanted them to do, the the planning we wanted it to do. Then question once more: should we be using a trust within that protection product? And if you should start getting the ball rolling with that, set up the paperwork with the insurance provider. It doesn't take a lot of time, it doesn't involve any cost often, but it's can lead to significant, significant tax savings and also just significant headache relaxation at a very difficult time. Because if you don't then ultimately the proceeds of that policy that you've taken out could take longer to get to the right people, and it just adds financial complexity at a really emotional time already. Using a trust allows it to be cleaner, it's paid to an independent body, if you like, that is what a trust is, and it allows that to go to the beneficiaries at the right time with some tax savings also. But do take some advice on this if your situation is complex or you've got any doubts. But for most people, a plain and simple off-the-shelf trust from your insurer will do the job very, very nicely. The last tip I will give you, because I do not want to lose you here, could go on and on. There's lots of financial resolutions you can implement, but the simple one that has the potential for highest reward is question is there anything you're losing out on from HMRC that would be of financial benefit to you if you just invested a little time. So things like if you're spending a lot of your take-home pay on professional expenses that are mandatory for your job, have you reclaimed these through HMRC? They could result in tax savings because they could amend your tax code, or you could have a nice lovely rebate on its way back to you. I did this last year for my partner Hannah, she's a doctor in the NHS, and they have a lot of professional expenses, they've got expenses for exams, for some of their equipment, you'd hard to believe, but doctors do have to pay for their stethoscopes, their professional memberships. By noting all this to HMRC and recognizing that Hannah has spent for this out of her post-tax income, HMRC, you're saying, hold on, you've paid more tax than you should have because you've spent some money on things that are necessary for your job for your income. So the same principle applies to you, whether you're a doctor in the NHS or otherwise, reclaim these professional expenses because you could be losing out on money that is sitting there on the table waiting for you to recollect it. And of course, one of the biggies that many people forget about is reclaim higher rate and additional rate tax relief on your pension contributions if this is applicable to you. As a reminder, you do get tax relief at the marginal rate of income tax you pay. There's been rumors about this being changed and becoming less favorable for a couple of budgets in a row now. It's still not the case. We still have great opportunity for the higher rate and additional rate taxpayers to get massive returns on their pension contributions by virtue of the tax relief they're entitled to. However, remember you only get the basic rate of tax relief immediately. And what I mean by that is the basic rate of tax relief will be credited or will feed into your pension contribution straight away. If you want to reclaim the additional 20 or 25%, keeping it simple, south of the border, less complicated tax rates. If you want to reclaim your higher and additional rate tax relief on those contributions, you need to tell HMRC how much you have paid into pensions in that tax year so they can recognize that you are due back more. So many people leave this on the table. So many people don't understand the subtleties and the nuances of higher and additional rate tax relief on their pension contributions. But so many people are not you, money nerds. So do that today. Log into your HMRC portal. HMRC are making this better now than it's ever been. They've even got a flashy, sexy new app you can use. Invest a little time, get your account set up, and do this regularly every year, whether it's this time of year or another, just log in for half an hour, make sure they are collecting the appropriate level of tax from you, their tax code is appropriate, and reclaim anything that is missing. Because if you don't, they're very unlikely going to reach out to you. Certainly when it comes to things like your higher and additional rate tax relief. Because if HMRC are not made aware of it, how can they possibly give you the money back? You'll appreciate, guys, there's a lot there, a lot of homework for you to be thinking about. Remember what I said at the start? You only need to implement one of these things if you can only be asked with doing one of them, and I will have done my job well in this personal finance Friday update. Remember, this stuff is fairly low effort, but significantly high reward, and that's the best type of financial planning. And it's common with a lot of financial planning, is there's not much warrants great levels of sophistication or complexity. Of course, some things do come up that do warrant a deeper dive, but often it's just making little tweaks to your behavior, to your practices, to the way you view things that will compound over time. So let me know how you get on. If you've any questions regarding anything I've talked about in this opening episode of 2026, do reach out to me. I'd love to hear from you. And as a reminder, again, if you're getting any value from the podcast, do leave a comment or subscribe or like. Let me know, it gives me a massive pat on the back and gives me the confidence to keep going with this and keep delivering financial education to you every Friday morning. Or whenever you're listening to this. So I'll wrap it up there. I hope you're all excited to get going for January 2026. I hope you're all feeling well rested and ready to take ownership of your financial futures in 2026. Ignore the New Year's resolution, this is not a new year, new me mindset. That doesn't work. Instead, just chill. Sit on your armchair, listen to this episode of Heads Up on Money, grab your phone or your tablet or your laptop, and just make a couple of these tweaks that I've suggested today. I promise you, future you will thank you. I'll see you next Friday. Until then, have a great week, have a great weekend, stay safe out there. Goodbye for now.