💸 Check off These Money To-do's 💸

✨ This Month’s Themes ✨

Our money themes help ground us each month and remind us where to focus on our intentions throughout the year.

🔍 Clarity

Get clear on what you want to accomplish this year and how you want the year to feel for you.

🧘🏾‍♀️Refresh and Reset

Rest! Everything doesn’t have to be accomplished all at once. Give yourself a moment to rest, reset, and refresh.

✅ Vision and Goaling

Allow yourself to daydream, then start drafting out what would be needed to make those dreams a reality. Remember, an elephant is eaten one bite at a time.

🔍 In this Issue

• The insurance industry is responding to climate change

• Use these tools to help you plan this year

• Money Checklist

• My Final Two Cents

• Introducing Something New

Need to catch up? Read our latest issues here.

This Week’s Money News

👛 Wallet Watch

• 🟤 Planning to max out your 401k this year? We created this free tool to help you calculate your contributions.

• 🟤 Medical debt is finally banned from credit scores. Read more here.

• 🟤 The LA fires put a spotlight on insurance. Here’s what you need to know about how the insurance industry is changing in response to climate change.

New Tools

Fiscal Focus

💸 Your New Year Money Checklist

Happy MLK Day from Ed. Opal! No matter how you’re feeling today, we’re sending lots of solidarity, support, and hope as we enter the next phase of 2025.

It’s that time of year again when we’re all getting our budgets together. Budgeting can be a great start, but here are a few other things to consider to help set you up for financial success this year.

1️⃣ Check and protect your credit score
We just left a heavy and identity-theft-prone spending season. Now is a great time to check your credit score and review your credit report to ensure no errors are popping up that may negatively impact you. You can access your credit score free from all three bureaus: Transunion, Equifax, and Experian. The bureau's website can be very salesy, so be mindful not to click on any offerings you don’t want to buy. They’ll usually offer credit protection products, but most are unnecessary if you already have credit monitoring via your financial institutions. Now may also be a good time to freeze your credit report via the bureaus. Freezing your credit report is free. Some bureaus may suggest you “lock” your credit report for a fee. This is likely not necessary if you’re already freezing your report. Another way to check your full credit report for free is via annualcreditreport.com. This website is a bit more bare-bones, has fewer sales ads, and allows you to download your free credit report from each of the three bureaus weekly. Review addresses, job titles, etc., to ensure accuracy when accessing your report.

2️⃣ Review your estate plan
There’s been a lot of conversations about generational wealth in the Black community. There should be as much, or maybe even more, conversation around Estate Planning. You can’t pass your wealth down if it’s not protected. That’s where Estate Planning comes in. An estate plan is essential if you want to ensure the wealth you’re building now is passed down to your loved one. The new year is a great time to review your estate plan for updates that may need to be completed. Did you buy a home? Did you sell a home? Did your family grow? Did you move from one state to another or even internationally? If you’ve had any life changes, be sure to run them by your estate planning attorney so that those changes are reflected in your planning and your wealth continues to be protected. You're likely wrong if you think you don’t have enough wealth to consider an estate plan. You don’t need to have millions in assets to get your planning in order. Talk to an estate planning attorney before you think you need to to ensure nothing falls through the cracks.

3️⃣ Update your 401(k) elections
Now is the perfect time to set yourself up to max out your 401k. If you’re unsure whether you should max out your 401k, talk to a CFP. If you have credit card or other high-interest debt, you may delay maxing out your 401k to focus on taking care of those priorities (but still contribute to your 401k enough to get your company match!). The individual pre-tax max for 2025 increased to $23,500 this year compared to $23,000 last year. $23,500 probably sounds like a hefty chunk of change, and it is, especially if you’re trying to bite it off all at once. We created this free calculator to help you figure out how much you’ll need to contribute per paycheck so that contributions aren’t overwhelming. The calculator works best for folks who get paid consistently monthly, semi-monthly, or bi-weekly.

4️⃣ Revisit and refresh your emergency fund
Emergency funds are so important. They help create peace of mind and prevent debt cycles that can occur when that financial cushion isn’t there. Now’s a great time to revisit your emergency fund. If you got a new job or experienced changes to your expenses over the last year, refresh your emergency fund savings to reflect those changes. Use this free tool to calculate how much you’ll need to save in your emergency fund to help maintain your solid financial foundation.

Vocab, Mindfulness, and Quick Facts

💰 My Final Two Cents

💬 Money Vocabulary:
401(k): A 401(k) is a tax-advantaged retirement savings plan. Named after a section of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code, the 401(k) is an employer-provided, defined-contribution plan. 1 The employer may match employee contributions; with some plans, the match is mandatory. Read more here.

🧘🏾‍♀️ Mindful Money Prompt:
What purchases are you most looking forward to this year and why?

📠 Money Quick Fact:
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s fight for equality was too expansive to sum up in an individual goal. Maybe that’s why ‘equality,’ an ambitious and ambiguous word, is often used to describe it. Over the weekend, I reflected on his commitment to economic justice. In 1966, he wrote an article for The Nation underscoring the importance of economic and civil rights reforms. One of my favorite lines from that article reads, “The danger of this period is not that Negroes will lose their gains. History will not repeat itself in a simple cycle. It can, however, fail to move forward and can become stalled on a higher plateau without prospect of reaching the summit.” You can read the full article here.

Celebration Syndicate

🎉 Introducing a New Way to Celebrate You

Did you get a higher-paying job, pay off a credit card, or meet a savings goal? No matter what your money accomplishment is, we want to celebrate you! Share your money wins here for a chance to have them featured in future newsletters and on Ed. Opal socials!