We’re in the final weeks of the holiday shopping season. You have a gift for everyone on your list. Well, almost everyone. There always seems to be one or two hard-to-buy-for people. Or people you want to acknowledge, but getting something too personal may not be appropriate. Gift cards have become the go-to gift for many of us. In fact, according to WalletHub, sales of gift cards are expected to reach $204 billion this year.
You’ve made your holiday shopping list. Before you head out to the stores or log on to your favorite shopping site, we suggest you add something else to your list: a holiday spending check-in.
or most people working for a company, a significant part of the job is sifting through a whole lot of emails to determine which contain vital information. That means a bunch of potentially useful stuff—like updates on employee benefits—gets weeded out simply because there’s not enough time to engage with everything. But now, during this month when open enrollment typically happens, give yourself time to review the offerings for each of these potentially valuable employee benefits:
your online baskets with presents, it is essential to set a plan and create a realistic budget. It is easy to overspend with all of the excitement, but spending too much now could mean months of bills and high credit card charges in the new year.
The 2×2 System is where you set aside two hours on the calendar two times a month to complete a predetermined financial task. This modest but consistent effort can help you sustain financial health and build wealth in bite-sized chunks.
The last quarter was filled with new developments at your Credit Union. The most exciting was the introduction of Tulee, our digital banking platform. Thank you to all our Members who downloaded and are using the Tulee app. We hope it will make banking with us even easier. And be on the lookout for new Tools and improvements by the end of the year and into the future. We appreciate the enhancement suggestions – keep them coming!
your spending limits now and top up savings for gifts, activities, and travel. Calculate how much you’ll need for each category and divide by how many months you have left. Then have that amount deposited automatically into the respective accounts.
Session 1a: Set Up Auto-pay And Get Credit Scores
When you tracked your expenses back in February, did you remember everything, or have forgotten bills that popped up since then? Add these stragglers to your spending and savings plan, and then use that section of your budget as a checklist for automating your bills to ensure you never miss a payment.
Excited as we are with Tulee, it’s just part of our long-term plan for members, and I’m glad to report that we’re well on track. Recently we had a banking econometrics expert review and analyze our performance over the last four years to help identify how we could improve compared to the rest of the credit union industry. A byproduct of this was a set of metrics that compared us to industry performance averages.
