ABINGDON, Va. (WCYB) — As the year winds down, a financial expert is sharing five tips to help you save money and get your finances in order before 2025 ends.

News Five’s Natalea Hillen breaks them down.

News Five’s Natalea Hillen sat down with a Partner and Wealth Advisor at Concord Wealth Partners in Abingdon to learn how you can prepare and organize your finances heading into the new year.

As 2025 comes to a close, Concord Wealth Partners Partner and Wealth Advisor, Justin Lopez shared five general tips to help guide families through this time.

The first tip is to understand where your money went this year.

In order to fix something, you need to measure it and typically what I do with my clients to measure that is go back into their credit card app, their banking app and sort of evaluate where they’re spending went. Talk about you what was wasteful? What wasn’t, we always waste money. It’s Ok. It happens but being aware of your personal finances and your current situation sometimes it’s so much more important than having some big fancy strategy, said Concord Wealth Partners Partner and Wealth Advisor, Justin Lopez.

Second, review your retirement contributions. Lopez said even a small increase can make a big difference.

If you’re one of those people that’s not maxing out your retirement and you anticipate your employer giving you a cost-of-living adjustment this year. Let’s say it’s 2%, I think it’s a really good idea to increase your retirement contribution dollar for dollar with that, so if they give you 2, increase your retirement contributions by 2% because that’s a super painless way to improve your overall finances, said Lopez.

The third tip is to check your emergency savings.

About 67% of working Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck, which tells me they’re one accident or one unexpected expense from financial tragedy. A good rule of thumb is to have about three months of living expenses on-hand in cash in your emergency savings. For example, if your monthly spend is $10,000, I strongly recommend having at least $30,000 in emergency savings at a minimum, Lopez said.

The fourth tip is to look for year-end tax opportunities, including charitable giving.

If you’re over 70 1/2, qualify chair distributions is an opportunity to consider, tax loss harvesting in your taxable counts, 529 contributions might help some people on the state tax level for your kids or grandkids preparing for their education expenses coming up. Roth conversions are a great opportunity, but with that always strongly recommend that you talk to your tax professional before implementing any of that, said Lopez.

He also explained how to make the most of charitable giving.

A lot of people don’t realize their giving to their church on a weekly basis, really you can take those out of your retirement account they may not realize it’s nontaxable. It helps you keep your cash, said Lopez.

And the final tip, set just one financial goal for the new year, not five.

Typically, people try to do too much and with finance progress is super important, so it’s a lot better to make small consistent changes rather than trying to have some big adatious goal you know that is not going to get full filled, said Lopez.

Lopez told News Five’s Natalea Hillen preparation is key.

So just being forward looking and it just gives you time to prepare and you know being last minute with finances can really result in a lot of things not happening that should have, Lopez said.

And overall, he said this is the time to look ahead and get organized.

First off, speaking with their tax preparer or tax advisor, going into the New Year’s super important, a lot of people skip that. They can provide a lot of opportunities and tips, and I typically participate in that meeting with my clients. There’s a lot of good that comes from that but also take this opportunity to look at your legal documents in your estate plan. It’s just a great time to look back at what happened this year, kind of think about any changes that need to be made, so you can start with a clean slate for 2026 and know what goals you’re going after, said Lopez.