Our team reveal their financial resolutions for 2025
From better budgeting to being more selective in the stock market, this is what our team members are focused on for the year ahead.
My colleagues and I recently revealed the biggest investing and financial lessons we took from 2024. This time, we’re sharing our financial resolutions for 2025.
Shani Jayamanne
My investing resolution for 2025 is to refine my portfolio review process, particularly my approach to fees.
One of the core tenets of my Investment Policy Statement (IPS) is being mindful of fees and their impact on returns. My colleague Mark LaMonica recently discussed fees in superannuation in this article.
The AustralianSuper examples that he used were particularly pertinent to me as it is my super fund. Although I use the DIY Mix option with lower fees than premixed options, it's still important to evaluate whether these fees are justified by the value they provide.
As we move into 2025, I'll review my portfolio with a renewed focus: not just comparing investment products on a relative basis, but also on an absolute basis to ensure I’m making the most cost-effective decisions for my long-term financial outcomes.
Simonelle Mody
Getting my first job out of university, and then leaving that job for my new role at Morningstar, meant that my income fluctuated a lot in 2024. As a result, I often had to adjust my budget on the go.
I also noticed that I wasn’t taking note of minor financial liabilities (like subscription services gym memberships, etc.) and the collective impact they were having on my cash flow.
Now that I have established an emergency fund, my resolution for 2025 is to re-evaluate my budget and see where I could cut back unnecessary expenses. This should allow me to increase my investment contributions.
You can find Simonelle’s latest articles for Morningstar here.
Mark LaMonica
The life I want to live and my finances are linked. After all, why else are any of us investing in the first place? As a result, my resolution is simply to keep using and growing my financial resources to enable a better a life.
That means growing my passive income and spending some of it on travel. I’ve got a great line-up of trips planned for 2025 and I’m writing my contribution to Joseph’s article in Thailand – a good start. I want to ensure I have an equally good line-up in 2026.
I try to always remember that life is uncertain. Nobody knows what is going to happen. As the Roman philosopher Seneca wrote, “If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favourable.” Given this innate uncertainty in life and markets I’m trying to take another step to build resilience into my finances.
For me that means building sustainable passive income. The more cash that comes into the door the more choices I have in life. I also try and maintain a good buffer of cash in an emergency fund so will try and grow that incrementally in 2025. Simply put I want to be more resilient financially at the end of 2025 than the start.
Joseph Taylor
My resolution for 2025 is similar to the biggest lesson I took from 2024, which was the power of doing nothing. This time, though, I am less focused on my previous tendency to sell out of positions too early and more focused on how often I buy individual shares.
When I look at the shares bought for my portfolio, most of them were what I would call so-so opportunities: fairly good, but not worthy of Warren Buffett’s ‘punch card’ analogy that investors should act as if they can only make 20 investments in their lifetime.
By contrast, the two best performing investments of my life, by far, arose because short-term sentiment had become so bad – negative oil prices and ‘death of the office’ bad – that markets, in my view, offered ridiculous value to those willing to take a long-term view.
Truly great opportunities like that are very rare. Far rarer than the number of other positions I have bought for my portfolio in recent years, anyway. As a result, my resolution for 2025 is to be a lot stricter on which individual shares make it into my portfolio.
This does not mean that I will not be investing in 2025. Why? Because the likely reality that markets usually (but not always) get things “roughly right” is balanced with the fact that equity markets as a whole have served long-term investors very well.
In 2025, then, I will continue to build towards my long-term goals through index fund contributions in my super while keeping some cash aside for the next “punch card” opportunity.
Whatever your financial resolution is for 2025, this article by Mark holds several tips for making sure you stick to it.
