New Year, New Me: How To Change Your Money Attitude In 2025

As we kick off 2025, a lot of people consider what they want the year to look like and how to put their best foot forward, especially financially. Think: “new year, new me!” To figure out what the new “you” is all about, sometimes it helps to reflect first on what you’ve done in the past and what you want to change moving forward. Today, we’ll talk about the financial decisions and habits you’ve maybe had in the past and what changes you can make this year to embrace the new you.

 

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Transcript: 

Speaker 1:

New year, new me is the topic of conversation this week on Plan With The Tax Man. As we get firmly into 2025, let's look at ways where we can put the old self to bed and work on our new self from a financial standpoint. Since everybody likes to do that as a New Year's resolution, let's do that financially as well. Let's get into it here on Plan With The Tax Man.

What's up, everybody? Welcome into the podcast. Thanks for hanging out with Tony Mauro and myself as we talk investing, finance, and retirement with the big dog, the big kahuna over there at Tax Doctor Inc. Tony Mauro, what's going on, my friend? How are you?

Tony Mauro:

I'm doing good. Coming off the new year and getting ready for tax season.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I bet. Yeah.

Tony Mauro:

Very relaxed. Yeah.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Well, I'm glad you're relaxed, because I'm sure it's going to get hectic right soon-like, you know? So it'll be all up in your business with all that good stuff, but that's all right, because that's what you do. You've been doing this for 30 years, man. You've got a lot of experience. So you ready to go?

Tony Mauro:

I'm ready to go. We got some good topics to start out this new year.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So are you a resolution-y kind of guy?

Tony Mauro:

Yeah. I have a few, but I tend to write them down, so-

Speaker 1:

Okay. That helps.

Tony Mauro:

Yeah, does help. Well, for me, it's a few financial, few personal, and try not to make too big of a list, because otherwise, we don't get it done.

Speaker 1:

Exactly. Yeah. I spent most of my life not being one, got into my 50s, and then decided last year to write down four, to your point. I only did four, and I was able to accomplish all four, and it made a difference, so I was like, "All right, not bad." You know?

But I did forget, actually, there was a lot of things going on, and I didn't do it this year to walk into 2025, so I'm going to see if starting late makes a difference. But I am starting, I just started 10 days late. But there's this thing called Quitter's Day, which you can look up. People make resolutions and then they quit. I want to say I think it's the 16th, which I think is when we're dropping this podcast if I'm not mistaken.

So I thought it would be interesting for us to go ahead and continue that trend by saying, okay. We're not going to do the Quitter's Day thing because we're going to launch this after maybe people have kind of weeded themselves out, and do this podcast on new year, new me.

So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to give you the old you financial kind of statement, Tony, somebody who might find themselves in one of these categories, and then I want you to give us the new you spin, like what you should try to focus on if you're trying to go in a more positive direction. Okay?

Tony Mauro:

Sounds good.

Speaker 1:

All right. So the old you might say, for example, "I overspend, and I know it, and I live beyond my means." Well, kudos, first of all, if you can get yourself to admit that, right? Because that's a tough step right there. But if you are living beyond your means, that's the old you in 2025, the new you should be doing what?

Tony Mauro:

I think the best thing for the new you really should be to, number one, you have to track your spending so that you know what you're spending money on, so again, so you can prioritize and maybe purge out some of this overspending. But you have to identify what you're spending on first, otherwise you have no idea.

And so rather than trying to just come up with that word that I hate, but you think most accountants like it, is budget, I like to just call it a spending plan. And basically, you've got to prioritize and list what you value most and what you can cut out because that is going to be the biggest thing to help you curb that spending.

And I'm guilty of it too. I'm kind of an impulse buyer as well from time to time. And you just have to keep that in check because I think that's why so many Americans run up their bills or credit card bills and everything else because they just keep spending thinkin