You’re a high earner, good saver and consistent investor. But do you feel like there’s something missing when it comes to financial planning? Time and time again, during these types of conversations, I find myself coming back to six strategies.
I’m going to be talking to them today and how you can use them to make 2026 your most financially intentional year yet. Hi everyone! My name is Gina DiGirolamo. I’m a certified financial planner and financial advisor at blue Chip partners. This is blue Chip chats, which is our series where we talk about the technical and emotional sides of financial planning to ultimately help you make informed decisions about your future.
If you like our content, as always, please be sure to like and subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. Thanks so much for watching! Let’s chat! As I mentioned, I’m going to be talking through six financial planning strategies for 2026. And these really are evergreen. It’s not something that you necessarily have to implement in the first month or the first quarter of the year, but something I encourage you to review time and time again, whether you’re five years into your professional career or five years into retirement.
My goal is that there’ll be a few key takeaways that you can use and implement into your situation. Without further ado, let’s get into the first strategy. Before I talk about specific techniques, I think it makes sense to talk about behaviors because ultimately our behaviors are going to drive our actions. The first thing I’d encourage you to do is take the time to look back and reflect on what you’ve done in the past.
This doesn’t necessarily have to be going through every credit card statement and bank account, and looking where every penny was spent in 2025. But think about the bigger strategies that you’ve implemented, what worked, what didn’t work, and why. The reason for this is it’s really important to know where you’ve been, to know where you’re going. For an example, let’s say you’re in your high earning years.
You’re a couple years away from retirement, and you feel like you’ve done a really good job saving into retirement accounts. But maybe through looking back and reflecting, you realized that you didn’t prioritize funding non-qualified accounts, and that might make it a bit harder to reach your goal of retiring early. On the flip side, you’re a younger professional and you know you’ve done a good job saving for retirement, but maybe you find that you could be doing after tax contributions as well.
To add a little bit more to those retirement accounts. Think about the bigger ticket strategies that you’ve implemented. And through this analysis, you might realize that there’s an area that is missing or that you’re lacking that you can work to improve moving forward. The second thing I would encourage you to do, going along the behavioral finance topic, is actually set time aside to create goals for yourself.
I feel like there’s a lot of noise and differing opinions on on goal setting, and I don’t think it necessarily has to be very strict, targets at a certain point. But sit down by yourself or with your spouse, your significant other, and really understand what type of goals you have for your life as well as your lifestyle.
I think it’s easy as financial advisors to hear a client’s situation and immediately jump to. Now I need to solve a problem and add in this strategy to optimize this. But without knowing the type of goals and the type of life and lifestyle that you want to have, you can’t really make decisions on the planning that has to be done.
If you’re nearing retirement, this is a crucial time to especially think about the lifestyle and life experiences goals that you might have. If you want to take those trips you’ve always wanted or spend extra time with your grandkids, even though it might not have direct implications to your financial plan.
It’s really, really important to start to think about these things so that you have not just a target end date of retirement, but an idea of what you want your look, your life to look like after that point in time. Additionally, if you’re a young professional, let’s say a young family, and you have kids that you know, at some point you might want to fund their college education.
It’s the time to start thinking about what that goal is. So you can start to create a strategy around planning for it and funding it. In addition to reflecting on what you’ve done in the past and setting your goals for the future. Let’s talk a little bit more in these next couple strategies of specific techniques and financial planning recommendations.
The third thing I’d encourage you to do is create a balance sheet for yourself and for your household. It’s it’s funny. It’s so often I’ll be talking to an individual or a family that wants to reach out and work with our team, and we’ll be going through an initial conversation and they’ll uncover that they maybe had an employer and they were funding a retirement account, or for one K from 15 years ago, and they haven’t seen a statement or looked at this account since then.
And I’ve found over time, the more you have knowledge and awareness, the more confidence you’re going to have in your overall financial situation. So sit down, create a balance sheet for yourself. Compare what you owe and what you own, and really have a an analysis of what that looks like.
this is impactful for two reasons. The first being when you are doing financial planning. For certain techniques that you want to use, it can be really important to know what accounts and what account types you already have. Let’s say you’re able to do backdoor Roth contributions this year, and in order to do that, you need to make sure that you don’t already have a preexisting pretax IRA balance.
The second reason this is important is for estate planning purposes. God forbid anything happened to you or your spouse to have all of your assets and liabilities in one place will make it a lot simpler for the person managing your estate.
The fourth strategy is reviewing your asset allocation. Now that you’ve taken the time to put together that balance sheet, and you have an idea of where all of your accounts are held and what type they are, I’d encourage you to take some time and review the underlying asset allocation. I’ve talked to 30 year olds who want to be growth oriented investors, but while we’re looking into their accounts, we realize they have a 20% allocation to fixed income that they didn’t know about.
On the flip side, I’ve met with retirees who want to be more conservative investors, but they might have a more aggressive stock portfolio that they didn’t realize. This is really important that you know and understand what you own in order to feel more comfortable about your financial situation and make sure that those assets are aligned to your goals and how and what you want your money to do for you.
It can be very complicated to review specific holdings and asset allocation within an account. So if you feel like you’d like a second set of eyes on it, reach out to our team at blue Chip partners. We’d be happy to take a look.
If you already have an estate plan in place, make sure you’re reviewing it, understanding it, and it’s aligned with your current wishes. If you haven’t completed an estate plan, make sure that you’re taking the steps to meet with an attorney to get those documents drafted.
If you’re looking to get estate plan done and you’re a Michigan resident, reach out to our team at blue Chip Estate planning.com. They’d be happy to meet and help you out with that.
The sixth strategy is choosing one thing that you can add to your financial situation. To move the ball a little bit further down the field for 2026. In your financial plan, maybe you’re a high earner. You’re at the peak earning years in your career, and this is the year that you start to make backdoor Roth contributions to max out that account.
Or maybe you’re in retirement and you’re above the age of 70.5, and you want to start doing QCD, which is a qualified charitable distribution, to give a little bit more tax officially to your favorite charity and reduce minimum distributions down the road.
Or maybe you’ve been talking about getting life insurance for the last couple of years, and now’s the time that you make progress towards getting those applications in. And getting that done. I really encourage you to find just one thing that you can do this year to add to your overall financial plan. I think it’ll make you feel a lot more confident and have more clarity around your situation.
I hope this was helpful. As always, if there’s anything that our team can do to support you, reach out to us. We’d be happy to have a conversation and talk about any of these topics that I mentioned today. Thanks so much for watching. Can’t wait to chat again soon.
