{"id":168597,"date":"2025-12-01T03:48:33","date_gmt":"2025-12-01T03:48:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/168597\/"},"modified":"2025-12-01T03:48:33","modified_gmt":"2025-12-01T03:48:33","slug":"how-to-financially-prepare-for-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/168597\/","title":{"rendered":"How to financially prepare for 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

Real Money, a free weekly newsletter giving expert tips on how to save, invest and make the most of your money, is sent every Sunday. You\u2019re reading an excerpt \u2212 sign up to get the whole newsletter in your inbox.<\/a><\/p>\n

You\u2019ve only got a few weeks to wrap up your final loose ends at work, start planning your Christmas\/New Year celebrations, and pick up whatever presents you need for your family, friends and other loved ones.<\/p>\n

\"Put<\/p>\n

Put Christmas planning to one side and spend a little time thinking about your finances for 2026.Credit: Michael Howard<\/p>\n

The good news about the latter is that it\u2019s currently Black Friday, so you should still be able to snag a bargain<\/a> either in-store or online (and let\u2019s be honest, the sales basically last all of December these days so you\u2019ve got loads of time).<\/p>\n

But how about adding one more thing to your pre-Christmas list? Something that might take you a couple of hours, but will pay you dividends (possibly literally) over the long term? Something your future self approximately 12 months from now will be thanking you for?<\/p>\n

Loading<\/p>\n

Because not only is the end of the year a great time for Christmas shopping, it\u2019s also a great time to sit down and review your finances for the past 12 months, and plan for 2026.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s the problem?<\/p>\n

Around half of the country are considered financially illiterate, and a massive 86 per cent of us admit we don\u2019t know our monthly expenses<\/a>, let alone our expenses over the course of a whole year.<\/p>\n

Obviously, that\u2019s no good, and while I hope most Real Money readers are a little more attuned to their finances, sitting down at the end of the year to get a plan in place for next year can be extremely valuable in helping you get an accurate picture. It can also help you budget for Christmas presents!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Real Money, a free weekly newsletter giving expert tips on how to save, invest and make the most…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":168598,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[72,176,61,60,174,175],"class_list":{"0":"post-168597","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-personal-finance","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-finance","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland","12":"tag-personal-finance","13":"tag-personalfinance"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=168597"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168597\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/168598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}