7 Steps to Better Financial Health You Can Take Right Now

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.

Another reason to review your credit report is to make sure it’s accurate, because organizations use it to decide whether to give you a loan, a credit card, a job, a lease, and even insurance.

There are three bureaus that create credit reports: Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. You are allowed to access your credit reports from each bureau once a week for free from AnnualCreditReport.com. That doesn’t necessarily mean you will see changes on your report from week to week or that running your credit report that often is necessary. It could be useful if you recently had an incident that would leave you vulnerable to fraud.

Previously, Americans could only get a free report once per year, which is the frequency that’s protected by law, and it’s unclear whether weekly free access will continue indefinitely.

If you are worried about someone opening a line of credit in your name fraudulently, you can also freeze your credit, which means prohibiting creditors from pulling your credit report. They can’t approve a new credit account in your name if they can’t see the report. The downside is that during a freeze, you can’t open legitimate new lines of credit either, so you can’t apply for a mortgage or get a new credit card. You would have to first lift the freeze before applying.

5. Check Your Credit Score

Your credit score is separate from your credit report, though it’s based on the data in your credit report. It shows how potential lenders view your ability to pay them back. The higher the number, the better.

My favorite tool for checking my credit score is WalletHub. It shows credit score on a scale, a summary of your credit report, and a piece-by-piece analysis of your credit to help you understand what it all means. Better yet, it has a Score Simulator that predicts how your credit score will respond to different financial actions you might take, such as making a late payment or paying off all your debt.

This tool is especially helpful for young people, who usually have low credit scores because they don’t have much credit history, as well as people who want to improve their credit score for a specific purpose, such as applying for a mortgage or starting a business.

WalletHub reports your TransUnion Vantage Score 3.0, and that’s not the only game in town. There are other credit scores, though they’re all based on similar criteria, and the number usually ends up in the same ballpark. The point is you might have a potential lender who gets a different number from what you see in WalletHub, but it’s unlikely to be wildly different.

6. Verify Your Social Security Statement

Once a year, you should look over your Social Security statement and make sure it’s correct. Go to SSA.gov and either create an account or log in using your credentials for Login.gov or ID.me.

Download your Social Security statement and review the list of how much money you made each year, as reported from your federal tax returns. This list informs your benefits estimate. In other words, it’s what the Social Security Administration uses to figure out how much you’ve paid into the system and therefore how much you can expect to collect when you retire. Your statement also has a customized table showing estimated monthly payouts at different retirement ages. The longer you defer collecting, the higher the estimated monthly payment.

If you see an error in the list of reported income, start the process of correcting it as soon as possible, because it could take a long time and require the involvement of multiple agencies.

7. Review and Cancel Unwanted Subscriptions

According to a 2025 CNET survey, the average American adult spent $90 per month on subscriptions, and annually, more than $200 of that went to unused subscriptions!

How much do you spend on memberships to Amazon, Costco, Patreon, clubs, gyms, and websites, not to mention newspapers, magazines, newsletters, food, supplements, pet treats, video games, software, donations … It adds up.

Most budgeting apps flag subscriptions, and some credit card accounts do it. Look over those automatic payments and cancel whatever you don’t need. You can always resubscribe if you change your mind. For subscriptions you use avidly, check whether and how much you save by paying annually rather than monthly, because that can make a difference.