Momentum - Business to Business Online Magazine MOMENTUM January 2019 | Page 31

Retirement & Financial Planning Financial To-Do List to Assist with New Year’s Resolutions By: Don Burrows Hilltop Securities [email protected] Investing, saving, and budgeting are all great methods that may help with your New Year’s resolution of organizing your financial life. Let’s take a look at some quick tips that may be helpful in 2019. Investing can be intimidating so let’s start at the beginning! Log in and take a look at your 401(k)/IRA. Are your beneficiaries up-to-date? Have you recently had a life event such as a birth, marriage or divorce? Each life event could require you to make changes in your beneficiary allocation. Also, review the asset allocations and current elections set for your investments. Carefully review the allocations to ensure they reflect your current life stages, such as, investment strategies /objectives, risk tolerances, and time horizon. Never hesitate to contact your financial advisory team, if you need assistance reviewing your accounts or if you have other questions or concerns. My team at Hilltop Securities feels this is a vital first step into working with our clients. Secondly, saving and budgeting go hand-in-hand. Creating a personal budget may help answer the question “Where does all my money go?” An effective budget takes time and patience. You can begin by reviewing your detailed spending, and verify the amount currently budgeted, aligns with the true expense. For example, you could budget $20 a month for daily coffee, but when you review the account, you realize you spent closer to $50. You may want to adopt a discipline to stick to a $20 monthly coffee budget and consider reallocating the $30 difference to your savings account, for example. Which brings us to our next tip, reviewing your monthly memberships. 30 MOMENTUM / January 2019 This may seem like a small task, but most of us are guilty of starting a membership or subscription service, and after a month or two we stop using it, however, we continue to have the monthly fee deducted from our account. Take the time to review those automatic monthly transactions for services such as, Spotify, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Apple Music, and/or your gym membership, and ask yourself “Is this membership or service worth keeping?” Gaining an understanding of where your paycheck goes, and prioritizing expenses can assist you in working towards your savings and overall financial health goals. Don Burrows is a registered representative and investment adviser representative of Hilltop Securities Inc. (HTS), a registered broker-dealer and registered investment adviser who doesn’t provide tax or legal advice. The views/opinions expressed in this article are purely the author’s, and does not necessarily reflect those of Hilltop Securities, Inc., its Management, employees and/or affiliates. Information contained in this article should not be relied upon as a substitute for legal, tax or accounting advice, if assistance is needed, the reader is advised to engage the services of a competent professional. HTS is a wholly owned subsidiary of Hilltop Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: HTH) located at 1201 Elm Street, Suite 3500, Dallas, Texas 75270, [phone].