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00:00 Speaker A
So let’s focus on being wiser with your money heading into 2026, including whether it’s a wise idea to consider changing banks.
00:06 Speaker A
Joining me now, Lawrence Sprung, Mitlin Financial founder and author of Financial Planning Made Personal for this week’s FA Corner brought to you by Capital Group. Good to see you. Thanks for coming in.
00:15 Speaker A
So, changing banks is an interesting thing to sort of think about periodically, right? I I mean, I I’m just thinking of myself. I’ve been with the same bank for 20 something years or probably something like that.
00:27 Lawrence Sprung
Same here, same here.
00:28 Speaker A
Um, so why do do is it a good idea to maybe revisit that?
00:31 Lawrence Sprung
So, I I think things get complacent, right? And you look at uh you may have went there for a promotional rate or something else that was taking place and then over time, perhaps those promotional rates disappeared and you’re not getting all those benefits anymore. But the challenge is that you have all your bill pays, direct deposits, and most people, the pain of disconnecting all that is more painful than moving it.
00:54 Speaker A
So what do you need to weigh if you’re I mean, you need to weigh that pain, but like what would make it worth it to go to a different bank? Yeah.
01:00 Lawrence Sprung
So I think there are some good things that you can do now with maintaining that initial relationship that you have and if interest rates, for example, are something that you’re not seeing in your current bank, you can open a high-yield savings account, link it to the current bank, move money back and forth. We have a bank that we use for high-yield savings for our families that has a technology that says, hey, I want to leave $10,000 in my savings account
01:22 Lawrence Sprung
and the high yield savings account will look and audit that account every two weeks and if there’s less than 10,000, it will send money from the high yield back and if there’s more than 10,000, it will move it out of there into the high yield.
01:34 Speaker A
Oh, that’s interesting.
01:35 Lawrence Sprung
So there are some really good tools out there that are making it easier to get better interest rates.
01:41 Speaker A
And and in particular, do it sounds like then you think people need to expand their conception maybe if they’re, especially if they’re maybe older or they’re at more traditional banks to also think about some of the upstarts in the industry too.
01:53 Lawrence Sprung
I I think so. I mean, at the end of the day, right, the the safety is of utmost importance. People are at the bank because they want the FDIC insurance. So as long as that quote unquote upstart has FDIC coverage for those deposits, I think you’re fine. And we’ve seen some of those upstarts that don’t have the FDIC coverage and we’ve seen some issues with those over the last couple of months if not years. And uh you just want to be careful. But if that FDIC
02:11 Lawrence Sprung
insurance is there, why not?
02:12 Speaker A
Yeah. Um also at the end of the year, maybe a good idea to look at your spending, like how much you spent through the year, what the cadence was like, your budget. Is that is this a good time to kind of do that kind of thing?
02:22 Lawrence Sprung
It’s always a good time. Carve out a couple hours, take a look and say, okay, let’s audit how much money do we have coming in every month? How much money do we have going out? And it’s more important where is that money going out? Is it going out to things that bring me joy and things that I am benefiting from? If not cut them out. There might be a lot of things in there that you’re not even using. Cut those out. So it’s an easy way to find that extra cash flow
02:44 Speaker A
Right.
02:45 Lawrence Sprung
and then you could talk about maybe redirecting it to retirement accounts, education funding, other areas where it might benefit you much better.
02:56 Speaker A
I mean, how many things have we all signed up for that you then kind of forget about and it’s the recurring subscription every month.
03:02 Lawrence Sprung
All the time. You know, you all, I I think everybody can find at least one of those.
03:04 Speaker A
Yeah, it does happen.
03:06 Speaker A
Um we’ve been talking a lot here too about end of year thinking about your tax liability, thinking about that positioning as you go into 2026. So what should what do people need to do on that front?
03:17 Lawrence Sprung
Yeah, so you have a couple of weeks left to have an impact on your 25, uh 2025 taxes. So it’s something easy to take a look at and look in your portfolio. I mean, we’ve had a good year, so there aren’t a lot of losses, but if you do have that, you know, investment that you thought was going to be a huge winner, that turned out to be a huge loser, it might be a right time to sell that, take the loss and offset some of those capital gains that you might have otherwise in your portfolio
03:42 Lawrence Sprung
and have an impact on your 2025 tax returns now.
03:45 Speaker A
Is quarterly payments of taxes something that people should think about?
03:49 Lawrence Sprung
Yeah, I think it’s most important quarterly taxes for those who are self-employed, uh those who have a variable income where the taxes aren’t being withheld, such as interest, dividends, capital gains from investments. It’s important to make sure you’re ahead of that because as your your viewers probably know, if you’re not paying enough into the system and you’re not doing that on a quarterly basis, you’re going to get hit with a penalty and why give the IRS any more money than we have to.
04:12 Speaker A
Yeah, we don’t need to do that. All right. Thanks so much for coming in. La good to see you. And that was FA Corner brought to you by Capital Group.