Month Twelve: Year In Review
This may come as a surprise, but this year has finally reached an end—along with our Twelve Months to Financial Fitness Series. Over the past year, our series has guided you through a deep dive into your finances, your spending and saving habits, and raised your money awareness. If you haven’t been following along, you can go back and start the challenge. If you’re really motivated, you can repeat the challenge!
As a reminder, these are the topics we reviewed throughout the year:
• Analyzing Spending
• Creating A Budget
• Preparing For Taxes
• Paying Down Credit Cards
• Creating A Will
• Storing And Protecting Sensitive Documents
• Budgeting For The Holidays
• Entertaining At Home
• Shop Smarter
• Re-Evaluating Retirement
• Clearing Out The Clutter
With all of those challenges under our belts, let’s move on to reviewing the year to see where you made financial gains and where you may need some more work.
Why It’s Important
If you participated in the challenges, reviewing your progress and difficulties is an excellent way to determine just how much your financial fitness improved over the year. Even if you struggled to complete the challenges, just committing to improving your financial health is an achievement. If you haven’t completed the challenges, it’s still a good practice to review your finances at the end of the year and make financial goals for the new year. It may put you in a position to start preparing for your upcoming tax filings. It’s also important to identify and acknowledge any on-going difficulties you have to prepare for the next year. You’ll have a better idea of where to direct your focus. So let’s get started!
Considerations For Your End Of Year Financial Review
Our goal for this article is to make your end of the year financial review inspiring, informative, and productive—not make you feel bad about difficulties or inability to complete all the challenges. As with any review, remember to give yourself plenty of praise and view any hurdles as opportunities for growth in the new year. Since everyone’s financial goals and situations vary, your end of the year review should be tailored to you. While we provide some suggestions to get you started, you should also spend some time thinking about other information you want to review related to your financial status and habits.
1) Here is our end of the year financial review checklist:
2) What challenges did you complete/not complete?
3) For each of the challenges completed, which ones were easy, and which ones were hard, why?
4) For challenges not completed, was there anything in particular that prevented you from doing those challenges?
5) Did you create a budget, and how well did you stick to it?
6) Where are you having the most difficulty controlling your spending, and how can you improve next year?
7) What was your savings balance(s) at the start of the year, and what is it now?
8) What new (positive) financial habits did you gain? Are there any habits you still want to conquer, and how can you work towards that?
9) Do you feel more or less stressed about your financial health in general, and why?
10) What areas are you still struggling with and want to focus on next year?
11) What areas are you excelling at, and how can you continue that success?
12) Which of the challenges do you want to repeat next year?
13) Which incomplete challenges would you want to try again, and how will you set yourself up for success?
14) How can you pass on your new financial knowledge to friends and family members who may be struggling?
15) What else do you want to learn, improve, or focus on next year?
16) What are your new goals, and what action steps will you take to achieve them?
The Challenge
For this challenge, you can use the checklist above for your year-end review. If you don’t have one already, create a financial journal (a simple notebook or file on your computer is fine). Write out the questions above (and your own) and then fully answer them in your journal. Writing everything down will allow you to examine your progress and identify patterns and challenges. For an additional challenge, use this journal to create personal financial challenges and notations throughout the new year. Even if you feel like you don’t need (or want) to focus on your finances as heavily over the new year, keeping a financial journal will still help you keep your financial health on your mind. Finally, make sure you set concrete and reasonable goals for the new year and set up how you will track it.