Ep 273: The Mid-Year Money Checkup: 9 Things to Check Before the Year Slips Away

Well, hey everybody, here we are in July of 2026 and today we're going to talk about some mid year money checkup items that you need to be thinking about.

Nine things to check on before your year slips away.

Now, these will apply to business owners.

They will apply to the mass affluent, they will apply to the high net worth, and they will apply to just the average Joe.

Most of them are pretty applicable to all of us.

All right, everybody, let's get going.

I hope that you enjoy this episode.

And here we go.

Welcome to the weekly wealth podcast.

I am certified financial planner David Chudick.

This podcast and my wealth management practice are both designed to help the mass affluent to live better lives by how they handle their money.

We talk about financial strategies, prosperous mindsets, and simply how to build true wealth.

So come on and let's enjoy this journey together.

Let's get this episode started.

So you change your oil every 5,000 miles or so, right?

I mean, nobody waits until the engine seizes up on the highway to think about it.

You just do it on a schedule because waiting for a problem to announce itself is a bad strategy for anything that's expensive.

Your finances need the same thing.

And we're right.

Little bit past halfway mark of the year, which means this is exactly the moment to pop the hood before December sneaks up on you with a bunch of deadlines that you didn't see coming.

So today, no long story, no deep dive on any one topic.

I've got nine things I want you to check on before the year gets away from you.

Some of these apply if you're a business owner.

Some apply if you're not.

Almost all of you are going to hear at least three or four that apply directly to you.

So let's get to it.

But before we get going, help us out.

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Okay, so I'm going to talk about nine things this episode, so you better listen quickly.

We have a lot to cover.

The first one is the Roth conversion window.

So if your income dipped this year or if the market pulled back and your account balance is lower than it was, maybe in January, this might genuinely be the best year you'll get for a Roth conversion.

You're converting at a lower balance and potentially a lower tax bracket.

Both work in your favor.

This window doesn't say Open forever.

And it's not a go get it in November decision because the math depends on where your income actually lands for the year.

So let's review a little bit about how Roth conversions work with your pre tax accounts.

So your pre tax accounts, you are putting money in your accounts and you are getting a tax break on the way in.

And then when you pull money out of the accounts during retirement, you're paying taxes on the way out.

Now many people find that it is desirable to take some of their pre tax money and convert it to a Roth.

Now doing that creates a taxable event.

So if I have a $500,000 pre tax IRA and if I convert 50,000 of it to a Roth IRA, that will create some tax on $50,000 of income.

Now let's say I'm a business owner and let's say that my income is down this year and I'll be in a lower tax bracket.

Well, that's why this year might be the best year to work on some Roth conversions, because I'll pay a lower percentage of that phantom income this year to the IRS because my income was down.

The other thing that could happen is your IRA could be down in value.

And that's a great time to consider Roth conversions because you are converting more or the same amount of shares as you normally would.

But when that pops back up and the market recovers, you will have a higher account balance in the new Roth that again will come out tax free and not affect your irmaa.

Now if you don't know what IRMAA is, go back and listen to our episode that we did about it last year.

But it has to do with your Medicare premiums.

Number two is your charitable giving strategy.

So if you give to charity every year anyway, and I know a lot of you do, stop writing that check in the last week of December out of habit.

Look at bunching a few years of giving into one year or funding a donor advised fund now while you actually have time to think through it instead of doing it in a panic between Christmas shopping and New Year's.

Remember, if you make a contribution to a non profit organization that has to be done by midnight of December 31st or else it doesn't count for this year.

So don't let it sleep up on you.

And be purposeful with your giving.

Right?

Don't just give because you want to get a quote, write off.

Give the right amount for you.

Give some thought into what really is in your heart as far as how generous you should be based on your current, your current desires and your current financial situation.

So take a little bit of time, slow down, ask yourself, ask your partners, ask your financial advisors, ask your family members, what should our giving strategy be for this year?

What does my financial reality allow me to do?

So number three, what about a retirement contribution pace check?

So do some quick math.

Take what you've actually Contributed to your 401k, to your SEP IRA, to your solo 401k so far this year and check if you're actually on pace to hit the max, if you need to hit the max, and if you can afford to, or if you are close to it.

This has to be done by December 31st.

If you're behind, you've still got almost six months to adjust the number coming out of every paycheck.

If you wait until October to notice, you've got two or three months to fill a six month gap.

And that's a much harder math problem that will create much smaller paychecks for you between then and the end of the year.

So if you have a financial advisor, this might be a great phone call or great appointment topic and that's to make sure that you are contributing the correct amount of money to your retirement plans this year.

Now you know I love the business owners and we always have to have some content and advice for the business owners.

So let's talk about your buy sell agreement and your valuation freshness check as number four.

So if you have a buy sell agreement, when's the last time you actually looked at it?

Not just to confirm that it exists, but read it.

A lot of these were written years ago with a valuation formula or fixed number that has no nothing to do with what the business is actually worth today.

So here's the deal with buy sell agreements.

Let's say you have a business partner.

Let's say your business partner passed away tomorrow.

More than likely you are now a business partner with that partner's spouse or heirs.

Now again, more than likely you didn't choose to be business partners with their spouse and you probably don't want to be business partner with their spouse and their spouse may not want to be a business partner with with you.

So what business owners typically do is they have an attorney drop an agreement that in really basic terms say if you die, I'll buy your heirs out and own 100% of the company.

And if I die, you will be obligated to buy my heirs out and you will own 100% of the company.

Now that's easy to do if your cash flow is very high.

But oftentimes for companies that have valuations of millions and millions and millions of dollars, when one partner dies, the other partner doesn't have the ca to buy the heirs out.

So at that point, there are two things that you can do.

You can borrow money or maybe you would have taken out a life insurance policy on your business partner.

So for a lot of business owners, the answer is, yeah, like I have not looked at my buy sell agreement.

I'm not sure how relevant it is.

But make sure that we're doing this not in a crisis or in the middle of a real life event.

Now, if you want an estimate of what your business might sell for now, this is not a certified appraisal, but take the sellability score.

It'll give you a range of values.

So go to www.weeklywealthpodcast.com sellabilityscore.

That's www.weeklywealthpodcast.com SellabilityScore.

It may take you 10 or 12 minutes.

You'll answer some questions.

It'll help you to understand what parts of your business can become more valuable if you nail down some of the eight drivers of value.

And it'll also give you a range of values that your business might sell for.

This is a really good starting point and a really good way to have that conversation.

Then of course, if the buy sell agreement itself needs any updating, that's where your attorney gets involved and that's where they can help you make sure that you are on point legally.

Now, what about a mid year profit and loss sit down?

So if you sit down with your profit and loss statement and hopefully you have one of them, hopefully you're working with a bookkeeper or a CFO or fractional CFO inside of a program like QuickBooks or anything like that.

There are many of them, but it doesn't matter who's across the table from you.

It could be your cfo, it could be a fractional cfo, your financial advisor, your cfo, or honestly, just yourself and a cup of coffee, or yourself and a spouse or a business partner.

But what matters is that you actually look at where the business is tracking against where you would where you assumed it would be in January.

Half the value here isn't even in the analysis.

It's in the discipline of doing it on purpose on the date you picked instead of finding out in February how the year actually went.

Okay, so we have to know the numbers.

This is no fun.

And this is why I am a huge proponent of working with professionals.

Because if you have your CFP or if you have your CPA or fractional CFO working with you, pulling these reports and almost forcing you to look at them, then it makes you make the decisions that we all know that we need to make.

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Alright, so number six is one that I am not really good at and that's the subscription audit.

So if you pull up your bank statements, your credit card statements and actually read through every recurring charge, so don't skim through it, just read through it.

And this is if you're a business owner, it applies to your business account and if you're a.

And on the personal side, it applies to your personal expenses also.

So do you remember when maybe that series came out that you saw on social media, that is on one of the streaming services and you signed up for that streaming service for a free seven day trial and you said, yes, I will go in and I will cancel it before the seven days is up.

And of course you're busy, I'm busy, we're all busy.

We never unsubscribe to those streaming services, right?

So if you have two or three or four of them coming out of your credit card every month for $10, $20, $30, that's real money.

That adds up.

Now what about the app trial?

That quietly became a real charge eight months ago.

$10 A month, $20 a month, those kind of things add up.

Again, the gym membership, you haven't been there since March.

Well, maybe either start going to the gym and getting your money's worth or cancel the gym membership.

Now some of these are not going to change your retirement date.

But I always make a joke that I'm the one who talks about this stuff all the time, right?

But I screw this stuff up a lot.

I had one of those car wash subscriptions in a car wash in my town and it was, I don't know, $20 a month, no big deal, right?

Well then a car wash opened right by my office and I said this is going to be more convenient and I can actually support the local economy if I get a subscription to this car wash.

So the New one was actually, I think $5 less per month.

And I told myself I would cancel the old one, but two months, five months, six months, I don't know, maybe it was a year that I had two car wash subscriptions.

So again, it's not a difference between being able to afford groceries or not.

But why let money just leave your life with just carelessly see what you can find that's recurring that you're not using.

Also, on the business side, I bet if you're a business owner, I bet there's some software that you're not using anymore.

I bet maybe there's an advertising program that's not yielding results.

So the subscription audit, it'll take you a few minutes.

Make a game out of it and see how much money you can find that you've been spending each month that's not yielding results or that you're not using at all.

All right.

Number seven is the portfolio drift check.

So most of us, if we're not working with a financial advisor who's managing our money, we need to look at our investment portfolios.

So if you intended to have a 70, 30 split of stocks versus bonds in January, maybe at this point in the year, you have an 8020 split, or maybe a 6040 split, or maybe a 5050 split.

And that's without ever even making a single trade because one of your asset classes may have done significantly better than you expected and better than the other asset class.

So that's drift, and it's worth checking out before it turns into a real risk level event that you didn't actually choose.

So look at your portfolio, look at your different accounts, make sure that you still own the same percentage of the holdings that you want to own.

And if not, you got to take the time.

Again, if you're not working with a financial advisor who's helping you with this, if you're doing it on your own, you have to go in and rebalance.

Remember, one of the simple principles of investing is buy low, sell high.

So if we started off with a 70% stock, 30% bond allocation, and if maybe six months into the year, you now have 80% of your money in stocks, 20% in bonds, let's buy low, sell high.

Right.

So if we sell off some of the stocks, we're selling high and we are realizing some profit, and then we're going to buy some of the bonds, that in theory would be at a low.

So that's a really overly simplified explanation, but we need to make sure that our allocations make sense and they don't drift.

Now, what about a net worth snapshot?

If you calculate your net worth now, today, and you put it next to the number from January, so that's assets minus liabilities.

Most people have a vague sense of whether things, you know, are they going fine.

But very few people can actually tell you the number in either direction.

Now this takes 15 minutes.

Or if you're a client of mine, you would just log into your portal and you would know.

But actual data is important to have instead of a vibe.

All right, so is your net worth increasing or have you gradually drifted into debt?

Is your net worth increasing because your investments have done well, but you're not necessarily contributing as much as you need to?

Or is your net worth increasing because you're contributing a lot and your investments have not done well?

Or, or some combination of both?

Okay, so it's great to have the data and know what your net worth is.

And we're early enough in the year to where we can still do some things about it if it's not where you want it to be.

All right, and here's number nine.

Did anything big happen this year?

So this is like an all in one catch up.

Did you get married, divorced, have a kid, get an inheritance, buy a house, start a business, sell a business, have health issues, get a big promotion, lose a job?

Now those are not just emotional milestones, those are triggers to actually revisit the whole plan, not just one line item.

So a new spouse might mean new beneficiaries, new kid might mean new life insurance, or at least revisiting how much and what type of life insurance you have.

Maybe you bought a new house and you, your umbrella insurance policy should be added into the conversation.

Maybe, just maybe, you had a health issue and you are a business owner and now you're starting to think about your exit strategy.

Like what would happen if you didn't wake up.

So these are all things that we need to look at.

So if you're not at any of these, that's not a get to it eventually.

That's like, do it this year.

And in an ideal world, it's due with your financial advisor.

And you can Certainly email me davidarallelfinancial.com if you'd like to discuss it.

Or it's think about these things at a point very soon.

Life doesn't wait for your annual review to happen for you.

If something big happened this year, then your plan needs to know about it now, not in December.

So did you have anything big happen to you this year, either positively or negatively.

Let me know.

Go to www.weeklywealthpodcast.com, click on the microphone icon and leave me a voicemail.

All right, so those are nine things.

Nine things, maybe three or four or five apply to you.

You don't have to deal with all of them this week, but pick two right now before you move on to the next podcast in your queue and put a date on your calendar to actually do them.

Not assumed date, like an actual date, or set an appointment with one of your advisors to deal with it with them.

That's really the whole message of this show.

How we handle our money should positively impact our lives and the lives of those around us.

And a 15 minute check in in July is a lot cheaper, financially and emotionally than the same conversation happening in a panic in December.

Or worse, not happening at all.

So if any of these nine topics raised a question you'd rather just hand off, go to www.weeklywealthpodcast.com Vision let's knock it out together.

These are important and what one of my favorite authors, Jim Rohn, said.

He always said what's easy to do is also easy not to do.

So some of these things things are easy to deal with, they're easy to address, they're easy to fix, they're easy to handle, whatever modifications need to be done.

But you're busy, I'm busy, we're all busy, and it's tough to get to them without a little bit of accountability.

All right everybody, that is going to wrap up the show.

And until next episode, I wish everybody a blessed week.

Thanks everybody.

The information presented on this podcast is for general educational purposes only and does not constitute financial investment, legal or tax advice.

Parallel Financial is registered with the U.S. securities and Exchange Commission as a registered investment advisor.

Registration does not imply a certain level of skill or training, nor does it constitute an endorsement by the sec.

All investing involves risk, including the potential loss of principal.

Please consult a qualified financial professional before making any financial decisions.

And here is your bonus content for this episode.

So you'll remember we did an episode about the Freedom Point and that's the point where maybe your business is worth enough money to where it can fund a big old bucket of money that can give you a very good chance of living the ideal life financially for the rest of your life.

So it might make makes sense to de risk and start thinking about exiting your business.

So if the Freedom Score is something that you would like to know what your number is, go to www.weeklywealthpodcast.com freedomscore that's www.weeklywealthpodcast.com takes just a few minutes.

It gives great information and it can help you to guide your decisions using facts, not emotions.

All right, that'll really do it this time.

Have a great week and let's catch up.

Next episode.