Personal Finance

The ball has dropped, and a new year has begun. Many view January as a time to make a fresh start and bid farewell to bad habits. In thinking about your New Year’s resolutions, have you considered whether you’re making financially healthy decisions?

Now is a great time to check on your investments, revisit your budget, and improve your overall financial wellness. Read on for six tips to boost your financial savvy for the year ahead.

Don’t trust that unexpected text or direct message from a stranger—it might be the first step in a “pig butchering” scam. So named in reference to the practice of fattening a pig before slaughter, these scams often involve fraudsters contacting targets seemingly at random, then gaining trust before ultimately manipulating their targets into phony investments and disappearing with the funds.

For World Investor Week 2022, investors, investment professionals, teachers, parents, researchers, and others are encouraged to make a special effort to promote investor resilience and sustainable finance.

While FINRA will never ask you for money, there are scammers who might try to convince you otherwise. These financial fraudsters are posing as regulators, requesting fees to transfer funds or offering bogus investment “guarantees” that will serve only to separate you from your savings.

Communications from these fraudsters can be compelling, but don’t take the bait. Neither FINRA, nor any of its employees, will ever provide a guarantee on an investment or offer to facilitate your participation in any sort of money-making scheme.

Investing in real estate can be a good way to diversify your assets. But if you don’t want the responsibilities that come with ownership, real estate investment trusts (REITs) can provide exposure to real estate without requiring you to actually buy or sell property.

On many measures of financial capability, U.S. adults generally fared better in 2021 than in the decade leading up to the pandemic, according to the FINRA Investor Education Foundation’s National Financial Capability Study. However, the research also shows that Americans’ financial well-being remains uneven across different demographic groups.

Some companies and recruiters use online job sites and video technologies as a convenient and cost-effective way to communicate with applicants. Unfortunately, fraudsters are using them too, and they aren’t looking to offer you a job.

A diversified portfolio tends to be harder to achieve than simply following the mantra to steer clear of putting all your investment eggs in one basket. This basic strategy can help, but it’s often not enough to avoid concentration risk—the risk of amplified losses that may occur from having a large portion of your holdings in a particular investment, asset class or market segment relative to your overall portfolio.

The first step in managing concentration risk is to understand how it might occur. Concentration can be the result of a number of factors:

When thinking about investing, one consideration is whether to invest funds all at once or over a period of time. If you choose the latter route, you might be opting for an investment strategy called dollar-cost averaging.

With dollar-cost averaging, you invest your money in equal portions, at regular intervals, regardless of the ups and downs in the market.

Volatile markets can inspire feelings of fear and anxiety among investors. Market surges and sags can occur for any number of reasons, including inflation fears, trade policy concerns, tax breaks, economic optimism, global events or a recession watch. When the stock market gets rocky, focusing on your overall financial picture, combined with sound planning, can pay dividends.

These five steps can help steady your pulse during market spikes and elevate your financial security: