MONEY HACKS: Three Tips for Spring Cleaning Your Retirement Accounts

As we begin to put winter things away, it’s a timely reminder to breathe fresh life into all aspects of our lives – including our finances. Just as we declutter our homes and freshen up our surroundings, our financial well-being also deserves a thorough spring cleaning. In this episode of Money Hacks, we offer valuable insights into revitalizing your retirement accounts for a more secure and prosperous future.

Now is the perfect opportunity to assess, realign, and fortify your financial strategies. In the video, we explore three essential tips to rejuvenate your retirement savings and set a solid foundation for financial freedom in the year ahead. By incorporating these simple yet powerful strategies, you can streamline your financial affairs, mitigate risks, and pave the way for greater financial resilience and success.

Any money questions you’d like answered? Our Money Hacks series is created from conversations we have with employees, investors, savers, and all people planning for their financial futures. What topics are on your mind for our next episode?

Video Transcript:

Hey, this is Alex Assaley, and it's episode number 114 of Money Hacks. The theme of today's video is spring cleaning for your retirement accounts. You might be doing this inside your house right now, going through your old closets and finding stuff that you haven't been wearing or using, and looking to clean them out of your house, maybe have a yard sale or donate them to an organization that will give them to someone who can use those goods or items.

Well, we suggest that you also do some type of spring cleaning when it comes to your financial accounts. Specifically, your 401(k), 403(b), or IRA accounts. So, I'm going to give you three tips on some healthy financial account spring cleaning items. The first one is to take a look at your retirement accounts, take a look at your investment accounts, and make sure you've got the right investment mix.

Are you saving and investing in a way that's right for you? So, make sure your investment allocation aligns with your age, time horizon, and risk profile for that specific account. And while you're doing that, specifically for your retirement accounts, look at how much you're saving. Are you getting the full employer matching contribution? Are you saving enough to get on track for your long-term financial goals?

While you're in there, the second spring cleaning tip is to review your beneficiaries or name your beneficiaries. We find a lot of investors who have not named a beneficiary on their retirement accounts. This is imperative because if something were to unexpectedly happen to you, your beneficiaries, when they're named, are going to be the individuals who will receive this money. So, you'll want to make sure it's set up in a way that's aligned with your wishes.

We find a lot of times people don't set beneficiaries where you think you set one up through your employer, but maybe that was the life insurance you get through your organization or something else. So, go into your accounts, into your various retirement accounts, and make sure you've named your beneficiaries. And if something's changed, if you've had a life event, update those beneficiaries.

The third step, the third spring cleaning tip, is to reset your password, set a strong password for your financial accounts, and set up multi-factor authentication, either a text confirmation or using an authenticator app. In fact, you should do this across all your accounts and make sure you're using different passwords. Too many of us set one password across all the different things that we log in to on our computers.

And that means if a bad actor or a hacker gets access to one account that they can get your password on, they can kind of go and get access to a lot of your personal information, including your financial information. So, I'm sure there are many more spring-cleaning tips you can think about when it comes to your retirement savings. Feel free to share what you think might be a good tip or two for the rest of us.

While you're doing that, log in to your various accounts, take a look at those three things, and put yourself in a good position for the rest of 2024. Thanks! See you again soon!