WACO, Texas — Along with our New Year's resolutions, making sure our financials are good to go for 2025 is a priority for many of our neighbors. Heather Healy talks with First National Bank of Central Texas to share tips to make sure you tackle your money goals.
- First thing, do a weekly check-in to check your finances
- Second, white down your spending: where is all your money going, and where can you cut back?
- Third, make sure to tackle your finances in bite-size chunks. Take it one day at a time. If not, your problems are only going to get bigger and worse.
BROADCAST TRANSCRIPT:
We’ve made the resolutions to get physically fit this year, but what about becoming financially fit?
“Maybe they go ‘I want to get into better shape regarding my finances. It’s a clean start,” Dan Ingham, Senior Vice President at First Financial Bank of Central Texas said.
Senior Vice President of First Financial Bank of Central Texas Dan Ingham has loved being part of our Central Texas neighbors achieving financial success for nine years.
“Seeing their wins, we are a commercial bank that’s a community bank. We work with a lot of small businesses, seeing them succeed, that’s a lot of fun,” Ingham said.
So to start 2025 in the right way financially, he says we first have to address where our money is going.
“The first suggestion I would make would be to make a weekly check-in. If you’re single, then it’s by yourself, if you’re married or have a spouse, once a week, maybe Sunday afternoon, we get together, take a look at our finances,” Ingham said .
Asking the important questions:
“Where are we spending money? What are some decisions we can make? That way, everyone is on the same page. So if you create the weekly check-in, that’s huge,” Ingham said.
After check-ins are checked off the list:
“The easiest thing that you can control is your spending. You can’t always control your income and what’s going to be coming in, but you can control your spending. If you start tracking your spending for like a month, say “we’re going to take a look at January, see where our money is going, you might be surprised, ‘oh, we’re spending too much on this, we’re spending a bunch of money on that, here’s how we cut back,” Ingham said.
Tracking, controlling our spending, and cutting back. Those are the three concepts to start with Ingham says to not be afraid to tackle this, because if not:
“If you avoid it, it’s going to become a bigger problem,” concluded Ingham.
