7 steps to improve your financial health you can take now

Save more money. It was the most popular New Year’s resolution in 2025 and the second most popular in 2026, according to Statista.

However, there is a difference between making a decision and acting on it. Get your way to better financial health by taking care of some routine personal finance tasks. 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 good time to do so.

1. Start preparing a budget

If you’ve already budgeted your money, the start of the new year is a good time to review last year’s spending and think about where you want your money to go in the coming months.

If you want to start budgeting for the first time, I recommend using a personal finance app for that. Specialized budgeting apps make the task more efficient and accurate than doing it on paper. The reason is that they use your spending history instead of guessing. They look at the past few months of transactions across your credit cards, Venmo, checking account, and other financial accounts and categorize every dollar you’ve spent. The result is a clear picture of how you typically spend your money, giving you a realistic starting point for creating budgets.

Apps like Copilot Money, YNAB (both recommended by WIRED), and Quicken Simplifi (similar but less expensive) do a lot of this work for you. If you want to reduce your spending on restaurants or entertainment, for example, the app tracks your spending in real time and warns you when you’re close to your set limit. This way you can make smart decisions before You’re blowing your budget.

2. Max out your IRA

I am not a financial expert, and this is not financial advice. However, many reputable financial resources say that increasing your annual IRA contribution as early as possible each year ensures you reap the full benefits of compound interest.

For 2026, the maximum annual contributions increased to $7,500 for people under 50, according to the IRS. If you are 50 or older, the maximum is $8,600. These limits are gradually reduced and eliminated if you earn more than a certain amount for the year.

If you’re not able 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 haven’t reached your maximum contribution for 2025, there’s still time. You have until the extended tax filing deadline (April 15 in most years) to contribute up to $7,000 if you’re under 50 or $8,000 if you’re 50 or older.

3. Adjust your retirement and savings plans

Set it and forget it retirement savings? In this economy? Take a close look at all of your retirement accounts and any private savings plans you have, such as a 529 plan, and adjust them as you see fit. Employer-sponsored retirement accounts sometimes come with tools in online portals that guide you in making appropriate adjustments based on changes in your family income, planned retirement age, risk tolerance and other factors.

The decisions you may have made on these accounts when you were 28 may not be the same decisions you want to make when you’re 45. Reviewing these decisions 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 measure your financial responsibility. It lists the accounts you’ve opened and closed, how long they’ve been open, checking account balances, whether you’ve missed payments or made late payments, foreclosures in your name, etc.

Checking your credit report is as much a security task as it is a financial one. 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 owing a debt you never created.