00:00 Speaker A
Many Americans obviously are struggling with budgeting, saving and investing, but for a person that’s trying to get their finances ready for 2026. What would you say some of the necessary steps they need to do now to start preparing for 2026?
00:15 Speaker B
Well, the zeroth step is to have information so you can make good decisions and, you know, you can get the information you need likely with the website of your financial institutions or you can get the information uh that that you need with applications like ours, quick and simplify and uh quicken business and personal and so on. So, just having a complete picture of your your assets, your liabilities, your income and your expense and you know, seeing that over time uh uh with, you know, at least a a 12-month perspective, ideally longer, gives you ground to to understand uh, you know, what your situation is.
00:54 Speaker B
And if you’re in a situation where there’s debt, uh, uh other than probably mortgage debt at an acceptable interest rate, um, I would encourage every family to focus on how to pay down that debt first. Uh and maybe taper back, you know, living expenses if uh uh to in order to to pursue what we call the snowball strategy, where you you pick your smallest principal debt first.
01:21 Speaker B
Maybe that’s a credit card with a high interest rate and you just try to pay that one down. Uh get it to zero and it’s just creates a feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment to check one off and then move on to the next, next and the next and it’ll take many years for many families to to get, you know, all the way to, uh, you know, where they want to be, which, you know, probably still you would have a mortgage debt, but maybe eliminate the the credit card debt.
01:46 Speaker B
So, zeroth order, understand your situation. First order, if you have expensive debt, try to tackle that, come up with a plan and reduce it. And then second order, after zeroth and first, would be start to think about the long-term. Understand your goals and that could be your own retirement, it could be looking after aging parents, it could be, um, looking to put your kids in college, which is not cheap. Uh and construct a, you know, an investment plan that uh, you know, that that can meet those longer-term objectives.