10 Easy Money Wins to Start the Year

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10 Easy Financial Wins to Start Your New Year Right

In this episode of the New Money, New Problems podcast, we share 10 straightforward financial tips to kickstart 2026. Starting with automation, we explain the benefits of setting up automated transfers for savings and investments. We then cover the importance of things like reviewing and shopping for insurance, defining and structuring emergency funds, planning for financial surpluses and contingencies, scheduling that one financial task you've been putting off. 

Come hear these financial strategies that help establish better financial habits and achieve their financial goals.

00:00 Introduction to Financial Wins
02:14 Automate Your Finances
06:07 Insurance Essentials
09:28 Emergency Reserves Strategy
11:17 Beneficiary and Estate Planning
12:50 Eliminate Unnecessary Bills
15:15 Transparent Financial Conversations
18:13 Understanding Your Pay Stub
20:05 Setting Financial Alerts
23:03 Planning for Surpluses and Contingencies
25:58 Taking Action on Financial Goals
28:24 Conclusion and Next Steps

Transcript

  In this episode, we cover 10 easy financial wins for the beginning of your new year. Let's get started.

Let's get some money from New Money, New Problems. It's the New Money, New Problems podcast. A show for successful professionals searching for the tools they need to navigate financial opportunities and obstacles they've never seen. Negotiating compensation, purchasing your first investment property.

Helping your family with money, the highs and lows of entrepreneurship, new money brings new problems that require new solutions. Join us as we work through them together. I'm Brenton Harrison, and this is the New Money, New Problems podcast.

Hello and welcome to the first episode of 2026 on the New Money, New Problems podcast. I hope that you all had a good holiday season in our house, we were stuck with Neurovirus or the flu or whatever it was that had our son just down bad as was almost everyone in his class.

But for the most part, the holidays were an enjoyable season. For this week, I wanted to start the ball rolling in the right direction or moving downhill or whatever the saying would be, and give you some easy wins to start 2026 that will improve your finances. I will tell you that we have talked on the podcast before, we talked about last week for the last episode of 2025, the 30 Money Moves Challenge.

That's the challenge that we're encouraging all of you who are interested in improving your finances to do in the month of January. 30 days where you can have a tip each day that you can complete in 30 minutes or less, that we feel will radically improve your relationship with   📍 your money.

If you want to participate in that challenge in full, you can go to New Money, New Problems dot com slash 30 Money Moves. These 10 tips that I'm going to give you today that we feel are easy wins are  kind of cherry picked from amongst those 30 days. None of these are the exact recommendation for a day.

It's like an accumulation or a compilation of some of those recommendations. But these are just some things where at the start of 2026, even if you don't do the whole 30 days, I feel will add some value and are things that don't require a PhD in finance to implement. And we're gonna start   📍 number one

with automating as much of your finances as possible. Uh, there's a quote that talks about, uh, compound interest, and the quote  I believe is attributed to Albert Einstein   📍 says that compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world.

  Well, I'm gonna add my quote that says, automated finances is the ninth wonder of the world. There are huge positives and negatives that come on either side of the equation with automated finances. On the negative side of the equation, there are certain expenses that you can add to your budget, certain pleasure purchases, or amounts that you pay for things where once you get used to paying for them.

It's outta sight, outta mind. Subscriptions uh, are a perfect example of this where it's like, hey, it really doesn't matter how big or small the subscription, once you pay for it for a few months, a car payment would be another example. You just kind of forget that it exists. You don't. Literally forget that it exists, but it stops having the same impact after a while as when you initially started paying for it.

The reverse is true, not in terms of like not noticing it, but in terms of the beneficial power of automating your finances for things that are good for you. Savings and investing, being chief among those things. It is always difficult to start a new financial behavior, like saving a hundred dollars a month or a thousand dollars a month, but after you've done it for a few months, your brain has that same ability to stop processing it as something that's as impactful, and it becomes just a regular part of your existence.

So if you can take that principle of automation and apply it as many places as possible, it can have serious positive impacts with savings, it's pretty straightforward. Instead of having to have the discipline to remember to put money from here to there every single week or every single month, automate the transfer of money from your checking account to your savings account.

Even better, since you can see your savings account on that same screen, automate the weekly transfer from money from your checking account to a high yield savings account that's on a different platform, so it becomes even more out of sight, out of mind for retirement accounts. There are many employer sponsored plans where you cannot just set the percentage of your income you want to contribute towards the plan.

You can also set an auto increase to that percentage. An example might be, right now you're contributing 5% of your income towards your 401k. An auto increase plan might say that you're going to increase that percentage by 1% per year up to a maximum of 10%. Now 1% may not seem like that big of a deal, but it has an impact, especially if you're a high income earner.

If you're Earn $200,000 a year, an extra 1% is an extra $2,000 a year, that's an extra $166 a month. But when you break it down, especially if it's a pre-tax investment and let's say you're getting a tax deduction that's worth 20%, that $166 really feels like 120, $130.

And when you break that across two paychecks, that's 65, $70 a paycheck, which is something that you're not as likely to notice, especially because you're not the one who pulled the trigger.

There are things you can do with things like mortgages where if you wanna pay your mortgage off faster, instead of paying it once a month, you can switch it to biweekly and based on the way the calendar lays out, biweekly mortgage payments lead to you making one additional full mortgage payment each year.

Now that takes some getting used to, so maybe you don't want to do it that way. Going back to the $2,000 example, let's say your mortgage is $2,000 a month. You might just add that $166 to what you're already paying. So now you're paying $2,166 per month.

After a while, it will not have that same impact, at least in terms of what you see,   📍 but the net result is that you're still making that extra mortgage payment per year, which on a 30 year mortgage can lower as much  📍 as four to five years off of the Repayment schedule for a conventional Loan.  📍 

Number two is to pick one insurance option to address and establish and pick one insurance that you are going to shop. Let's start with the ones that you're going to  establish, and this obviously implies that there's certain insurances that you're missing. You may not be, although I would tell you the statistical likelihood is that you are if you're not working with an advisor.

But typically when I see a missing insurance, it's often a people insurance, a health related insurance. You may not have individually owned life insurance and you could need individually owned life insurance. We'll put a questionnaire in this episode so you can see a calculator to kind of calculate what those needs may be.

If you have disability insurance at your employer, but you also have a lot of bonus income or overtime pay, or equity compensation, that's not likely covered by your group disability policy. So you might need individually owned, uh, disability insurance on top of your group plan, there's also types of insurances you may be missing that are not necessarily like a glaring omission, but it's something that still adds value and protects something you may need. An example that I see with this most regularly is with umbrella   📍 insurance.

We'll put an article that kind of talks about what umbrella insurance is, but essentially, umbrella insurance puts an umbrella over the top of your auto insurance, your homeowner's insurance, your renter's insurance, and it not only covers. Amounts that go above their  coverages. So for example, let's say that you have, um, coverage that provides a hundred thousand dollars worth of medical payments to others if they're injured in your home.

Well, what if somebody sues you for a million dollars? Well, you are exceeding the limits of that coverage for your homeowner's insurance coverage. And it might be considered damages that wouldn't have been covered anyways. That's something that an umbrella insurance policy might cover. And even beyond things that happen in your home or your car, there's personal liability that comes from things like coaching youth, sports teams or having a pool or a basketball goal or a trampoline at your house.

Serving on a board is one that people don't think of that carries potential personal liability. And an umbrella or personal liability policy is something that you can establish that can have some protection that adds value. When it comes to insurances that you're going to shop, the one where I often see the most juice outta the squeeze is homeowner's insurance, renter's insurance, and car insurance.

I have shared that I'm a proud USAA member have had. I've shared that I'm a proud USAA member and have been for a very long time, but every two or three years I still shop my car insurance and homeowner's insurance to make sure that they're still providing me the best rate. There have been times where it's been 50 50 and I've gone back to them and said, Hey, I'm thinking of leaving.

And they have found some type of customer loyalty discount to keep me there. So literally, just by telling them that I'm shopping somewhere else, I've secured savings. And if I got to the point where not only am I not getting savings, but they're significantly more than the next place, homeowners insurance and car insurance is not a difficult thing to shop and move like it is with a people insurance, right?

With life insurance, disability insurance, it requires physicals. It requires doctor's notes. If you have the dimensions of your car, your home, all those different types of things. Switching back and forth from one carrier to the next isn't something that I recommend every year, but it's also not a difficult thing to do, especially if it provides you with monthly   📍 savings.

Number three is to define and layer your emergency reserves. Now, if you don't have emergency reserves, this is still a conversation worth having. But defining  your emergency reserves means literally defining how much you want, how much makes you feel comfortable. It's gonna be different for each family.



So for you, it may be three months if you're in a dual income household and both, you know, occupations are very stable. Uh, it might be six months, it might be two years. That's the defining of your reserves. The layering of your reserves is a conversation about what does that actual structure look like, because it shouldn't just be in cash in your regular savings account.

For me, I like to have one month's expenses in our regular savings account, which earns no interest. I like to have months two to three in a high yield savings account where with that we're getting at least something that's going to keep up with inflation and instead of a 10th of a percent. We're getting three, 3.25%.

That's just a better way to keep money in reserves. Anything above that, I'm okay having in a non-qualified brokerage account that's invested. Now granted, having it invested means that just like the money can go up, it can also go down. But my comfortability is that number one, the investment is not incredibly aggressive.

But even if it were, by having the later months in that account, I should have plenty of time in the event of an emergency to either dial back the level of aggression or take it out of the market completely if need be for you, you need to not only define how much you want in reserves, but also identify how you're going to layer those reserves to get the most value out of them that you possibly can.

Number   📍 four goes back to the insurance. Well, I don't like to just hit you with a bunch of insurance, insurance, insurance 'cause you stop listening to the podcast because it's so boring. But number four is to  add contingent beneficiaries to your coverages.

If you have something like life insurance, even at your job, whether it's your spouse or your parents or your brother or your niece or nephew, you automatically think about, okay, well if I die, here's who I want to get the money. It's less common for someone to think through, well, what if I die? And that person who I want to get the money predeceases me?

Who does the money go to? Then that would be a contingent beneficiary. And adding them is important. It's definitely important if you're adding a contingent beneficiary and the person you want to add is not of age. So this is me kind of slipping in the importance of an estate plan into this conversation.

Because since a person who's underage can't make financial decisions for themselves, if you add money or add a contingent beneficiary, and that person is not 18 in most states, and money goes to them, the state is who decides what happens with those resources. So if you're thinking through that process and you're saying, well, the next person I would want it to go to is my niece or to my children, but you don't have a will, a trust, advanced medical directives and estate plan, not only is adding the contingencies important, but it also should give you motivation to establish that estate plan as well.



So this is the extra step to having a fully thought out and implemented estate plan as compared to establishing an estate plan and not going through the rest of your finances to make sure that everything points to the estate plan and the event of   📍 your death.

And number five, the last one before the break is my favorite financial step at the start of every year. I talk about it at the beginning of every year, and that is to identify  and eliminate one bill that no longer adds value. This is where subscriptions come into play. Every single January, I print off our credit card statements, I print off our bank statements, I get a highlighter.

I take that highlighter to the paper, and I identify everything that's automatically coming out of our account. And I cannot think of a year where I haven't found at least a hundred dollars worth of savings across personal and business purchases from not just major things that we're going out, literally things that we either had duplicates of or no longer use.

A Paramount plus subscription that my son hasn't logged into in months. A duplication of Spotify memberships that my wife and I both had. Not realizing that there's a family plan, whatever the case may be, identify and find those savings, but go the extra step of repurposing it towards your emergency reserves.

You're already used to paying this money. This is not new money out of your budget. Now you don't have to pay it anymore. So if you were listening to that step where we talked about identifying and layering your reserves and you had no reserves to speak of, or no surplus that you could use to your benefit,

this is a step that can help you in establishing it, and it's one that all of us need to take on a semi-regular basis.



This is the New Money, New Problems Podcast. A show for successful professionals searching for the tools they need to navigate financial opportunities and obstacles they've never seen. We'll be right back.

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Number   📍 six is to have a transparent conversation about your goals and behaviors when it comes to your finances.  Now, when I say a transparent conversation,  if you're not someone who shares your finances, this is something where you gotta have some self-awareness. This is an internal conversation that you're having with yourself about some things that you want to do financially or some things that are holding you back financially.

If you are having this conversation with a partner, the thing that I would stress is this is not an accusatory conversation about goals and behaviors, and I would encourage you to start with a compliment if you're criticizing someone else or instead of criticizing someone else first. To first acknowledge your own behaviors that might be holding you back financially.

This is a construct or a framework that we use with our private clients. In one of our initial meetings, we have a goals questionnaire, and we have two different frameworks that we use to shape the conversation. The first of those being start, stop, and do more of goals. As a matter of fact, if you're looking on screen, and we'll put a link to this in the show notes so that you can do this goals questionnaire if you would like to for yourself or for your family, you can see that there's a start goal, and this is something that you want to start doing financially that you're not doing now, and it needs to be something that's realistic and tangible, right?

You can't say, I want to start eating every single meal at home instead of going out. That's not a realistic goal based on most people's lifestyle, but a start goal may be to say, I want to start. Automating my savings from one month to the next. Going back to the goals that we've already discussed, the next is a stop.

This is a financial behavior that you want to stop. I would say I want to stop shopping at the grocery store without a list. I might say, I want to stop shopping on Amazon. I might say, I want to stop shopping at the grocery store without a list. Then there's do more of goals. Every single one of us has something that we are doing financially when we have the right behaviors in place that benefit us.

Right. You know, uh, for my wife and I, it has been very difficult for us over the years to have transparent conversations about money without them devolving into arguments. I feel like in recent years we have had a better framework that's less accusatory to have those conversations. I may say that our do more of goal is to have.

More open conversations in a relaxed environment about money. Those are start, stop, and do more of goals. Then we have time-based goals. We have a one year goal. Then you could have a short term goal of one to three years. Then you have intermediate goals. These are 10 years or less.

And then you have your stretch goal of 10 years or more where I want you to vision cast. Right. What does the rest of your financial life look like? These are an example of frameworks that you can use when having your goals and behavior   📍 conversation.

Number seven is to know your pay stub well enough that you can explain it to someone else. So when it comes to the pay stub, this is a function of understanding taxes and your employee benefits.

When we start working with a new couple or a new person, one of the first steps that we ask them to do is to provide us with two recent pay stubs.

And I can't tell you how many times we come across someone who is either not taking enough taxes out of their check, which could lead to a big tax bill, or they're taking too much out of their check. When it comes to having multiple jobs and getting double taxed for social security, their withholding isn't something they understand.

We also, when going through those pay stubs, they have insurances that they weren't aware that they were paying for. Maybe they are over contributing to something that makes their contributions outta whack. We'll come across someone who's putting more into their employee stock purchase program than they are into places like their 401k and it's not something that they were aware of because they set it and forget it so long ago that it's not something that's in front of them

when it comes to FICA taxes and O-A-S-D-I taxes and imputed income tax for group life insurance. It is a good skill to have to be able to know what is actually being withheld from your paycheck before the money hits your account. So I would encourage you to take 20 or 30 minutes, take out a recent pay stub, identify the things that you don't understand, Google the things that are googleable, reach out to HR for the things that are specific to your company, and have a better grasp on your pay stub so that you can explain it to someone else if you needed to, and you would be surprised the amount of insights that you can pick up that will either identify opportunities to save even more money or benefit from pre-tax deductions at a higher level,

or in other cases by making some adjustments to things like your withholdings prevent you from having a big tax bill that you didn't expect at the end of the year.  📍 

Number eight is to set your alerts. There are very few times that I have to log in to check anything when it comes to  my finances because most activities of note that would concern me financially are things that I'm automatically notified of. If I spend more than I want to in a certain area of our finances, I don't have to look at my budget to figure that out.

I'm automatically notified when I've exceeded a certain amount in different categories of my budget. If someone checks my credit, I don't need to know that. If someone checks my credit, I'm automatically notified

if my credit utilization has increased, I'm unfortunately automatically notified if I have a bill that's higher this month than it typically is, I'm automatically notified. And that's a function of the alerts and notifications that I've set up for different areas of my finances.

As an example, when it comes to credit, I've talked about bulletproofing your credit score, and one of the ways that I do so is just through services like Credit Karma and Experian. Both of them are free. I have a membership with both. Experian tells me my FICO score with Experian.

Credit Karma tells me my Vantage score with TransUnion and Equifax, and I have my notification set so that when there's anything that impacts my credit, potentially I get an email alert letting me know that it's occurred. I also have identity theft tracking through LifeLock. This is not a recommendation for these services.

It's just an example of what I use so that if someone checks my credit or if someone is trying to use a password of mine to establish an account that I didn't authorize, I'm automatically notified. When it comes to things like budgeting, investment alerts, things of that nature, bill alerts for things that have exceeded typical amounts.

I have Monarch money. Monarch Money is something where I can plug in all my accounts and in one place I can see account balances, I can see transactions, I can categorize them. But I can also set budget alerts for different categories so that when I exceed those amounts, I'm automatically emailed. So this is another function of automation, but even more so than the automation, is just the awareness that comes with making sure that there's not a bill that isn't paid that catches you off guard.

'cause you wouldn't want to check on your credit and you have a missed payment or a late payment that's now going to be there for seven years, simply because you didn't log on to a site every single day to notice that was missing. You want to be able to set an alert to let you know when it happens.

Hey, you need to pay this bill. This bill is late. Make sure you address it accordingly.

So I'll put a link to some of my favorite automated services so that you can check them out for yourself. There are other services out there that you can use if those don't fit your needs. But I don't want someone who has to through their own discipline, through their own monitoring, be financially aware.

You want to be financially aware, but if it always requires you to log in and check, then that's something that does more harm than good. Again, in my   📍 opinion.

Number nine is to plan for surpluses and contingencies.   It is not. A huge task to put together a budget. It's a very huge task to follow a budget, but putting together a budget is something that it's very easy to do, right? Like before you have to exhibit the behavior.

Just categorizing what you spend is not that difficult. It may be surprising when you figure out how much you spend on food, how much you spend on entertainment, but it's information that can be found, and when you establish that budget. Hopefully there's some level of surplus. If there's not, hopefully we've given you some tools over the years to identify what to do to free up some cash, but if there's a level of surplus, you can create a plan for that.

We just talked about how to automate the, you know, transfer from checking to a high yield savings, for example, what most people fail to do. Is to plan for surpluses that you didn't expect. Uh, that could be a bonus. That could be an extra check for whatever reason. If you're in my industry, maybe you've done a public speaking gig or whatever the case may be.

A surplus is something where you don't typically add that in to your monthly expenses or have a discussion about what you would do in those scenarios. So we encourage people, you know, say, Hey, on a monthly basis, you're gonna transfer $500 a month from here to there, but if you get an extra a thousand dollars, $2,000, $3,000, how are you going to handle that?

Could it be that you put. You know, 45% of it towards one thing, 45% towards another, and you blow the other 10% to congratulate yourself or have a little break from budgeting, whatever the case may be. Have a plan for your surpluses, just like you do for your typical monthly expenses so that when money comes in, you're not confused at how to use it.

When it comes to surpluses that we see the most regular use of it is shopping and travel. And the problem with that is not that you're using it on shopping and travel, I'm all for having some reward for yourself, but when you don't have a plan for the reward, you actually end up spending, in most cases, more than the surplus.

So you get that extra $500, and then you book a $2,000 vacation, you get that extra $300, and then when you consider taxes and shipping, you spend $400 on whatever it is. So in actuality, you dipped into the monthly reserves to pay for the thing that you expected to do with the surplus.

Instead, before the money even hits your account, have an idea for if extra money comes, here's what we're gonna do with it. And the same is true for emergency expenses. You're not always up. Sometimes you have some tough expenses, and I encourage you to have a plan for what you're going to do in terms of how you deploy the hopeful reserves that you have when needed.

  📍 And then lastly, we'll finish up with this. Put one thing that you've been putting off on the calendar, just one. There doesn't have  to be 10 different things that you address all at once. You could be in a position where you know that you need to switch tax preparers or find the tax preparer, but you haven't found the time to do so.

Maybe you are a person who knows when I was talking about contingent beneficiaries that you do not have a will and estate plan and advanced medical directives or powers of attorney, and you know that you need to do that, but you haven't done it. Maybe you're in a position where you need to go secure that insurance or you need to establish that account or cancel that bill, but it requires more than just going online.

It requires a conversation or a meeting, or a process. But I just want you to pick one of those areas. Find the professional with whom you want to work and put the meeting on the calendar. It's not because the other areas, you know, steps two, three, and four are not necessary.

This is all about momentum. If you start seeing progress with your finances, just like when you start seeing progress with your weight, just like when you start seeing progress with your knowledge base, it will grease the wheels, it will keep the motion going and encourage you to do other things. I am learning so much now that we're in the phase with our son of like working with him on homework.

Not that we just like didn't work with him on anything before, but when we were teaching him how to read, when we were, you know, trying to potty train him when we were doing all, when we were trying to teach him how to ride a bike, our son is the type of person where if he doesn't see any progress, he has no motivation to keep going.

Right? Like he wants to quit immediately if he's not good immediately. But once he sees that progress, he is gone. We worked with him to try to ride a bike for a year. A year, and he hated it. He would cry, he would run back in the house. He would try to hide his bike helmet, but the second we found somebody else to teach him, and that person

got him putting his feet on the pedals and coasting even before he could ride, just coasting and not falling. He was riding his bike that same day and now he won't do anything but tell everyone how he can ride a bike. The same is true with your finances. If you get one thing done and you do a hard thing, you will show yourself that you can do hard things and go do another hard thing, and that's how I would encourage you to start the process.

This is, I hope been as enjoyable for you as it has been for me. I love talking about financial progress and what you can do to improve your finances. Again, if you're interested in getting all 30 of the money tips over a 30 day process that we believe can radically  📍 improve your finances, then you can go to New Money, New Problems dot com slash 30 Money moves, and we'll be back next week.

See you then.