There's still time to reach your 2026 money goals
Life Kit
Host Mariel Segarra and business analyst Jill Schlesinger discuss applying corporate quarterly reporting techniques to personal finance. The
Key takeaways
- Jill Schlesinger recommends reviewing nine months of data to understand seasonal spending patterns and cash flow trends.
- A personal balance sheet should track assets like savings and investments against liabilities such as student loans or mortgages.
Main topics
- Personal quarterly financial reviews
- Cash flow and expense tracking
Notable quotes
I really hate amorphous goals. You have to be concrete, right?
Conclusion
The episode provides a practical framework for using the end of the ye
Transcript preview
Speaker 8 (0:01) This election season, you can streamline your news intake with Up First. Our team of reporters and editors works overnight, so you can start every morning with three stories you need to know. In short episodes, 12-14 minutes long, to save you time and your sanity. Follow Up First on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 1 (0:22) I was thinking of the fourth quarter of the year, just sort of like fourth quarter of a company's business year or the fourth quarter of a football game or, you know, they have quarters, right? Football? Speaker 2 (0:34) Very good question. Yes, they do. Thank you for asking that. Speaker 5 (0:38) Hey, it's Mariel Segarra. You're listening to Life Kit from NPR. And that was Jill Schlesinger. She's a CBS News business analyst, host of Jill on Money and the show Money Moves on YouTube. What I was trying to tell Jill is that I got the idea for this episode while thinking back about the days I reported on corporate finance. I was always looking at companies' quarterly reports, and they are technical, but they give a window into how a company is doing, what went right over the few months before, what went wrong, what challenges they're facing. Given that we're entering the fourth quarter of 2026, I wondered, what would it mean to do a quarterly review for our own finances? Speaker 2 (1:19) Well, I mean, it's basically looking at the same thing you would be looking at as an individual. What's coming in? What's going out? And remember, these quarterly reports, it's a little bit dated, right? They're talking about the quarter that just ended. So the three previous months. I think the more interesting part of quarterly reporting is not about what has happened. It is usually in the conference call that occurs. After the financials are released and the CEO or the CFO talk about what they think is going to happen. And this is probably where you get some of the surprises. They could be like, we thought our sales were going to be one thing. They're a little bit less or they're a little bit more and the stock price might react. But generally speaking, I think the biggest reactions come from when the CEO gets up there and she's like. You know that we thought we were going to make all this money for this whole year. We completely screwed up. There's no way we're going to make that much money. Those are the things that become really interesting when it comes to corporate reporting. But what could you take away as an individual is this practice of going through your numbers. On this episode of Life Kit, Speaker 5 (2:35) I talked to Jill about how we can do our own quarterly reviews this October and set ourselves up. for the fourth quarter and the new year. Speaker 2 (2:43) I think what's kind of cool is if you're looking at the fourth quarter, this is a time where you could do something different before the end of the year that might impact you. So what usually will happen is in the fourth quarter, a lot of decisions get made because you have open enrollment, for example, for benefits at work. Maybe this is the time where you're going to say, maybe I should go on a high deductible plan. And maybe that means that I have to take some extra money aside that I thought I was going to spend on vacation, but use that for any expenses that come up because I have a higher deductible and I have to pay it out of pocket. Think about it this way. You have 90 days to take advantage of the calendar and there's going to be a lot of competing forces. And of course, it would be silly of me not to note that once Thanksgiving rolls around, you're kind of screwed. Because all of Speaker 1 (3:36) a Speaker 2 (3:36) sudden you get sucked into the entire holiday season and it's a lot harder to get yourself focused. I Speaker 1 (3:43) wonder if you were doing like a personal financial check-in at this moment ahead of the fourth quarter of the year, what numbers might you highlight if you first wanted to get a sense of where you're at? Like I think about companies, they highlight their revenue, their expenses, cash flow, debt. Let's look at like the cash flow Speaker 2 (4:04) issue because now you have nine months of data, right? So here you're going to have by the end of September, right? You'll have nine months of looking at the money that has come in and the money that's gone out. You know, I always like to kind of look at the ongoing month to month expenses and then the little unique things like, oh, I had to go to a wedding. and it was a destination wedding, and I spent way more than I would have spent if I'd gone to a wedding down the street, right? You account for that, and you look at it, and you see where do I stand. And then you're also going to want to look at your balance sheet. What do you own, and what do you owe? If you have debt, maybe you've got student loans, maybe you've got a car loan, maybe you have a credit card debt, maybe you have a mortgage. That is where you just want to make sure you check in and you understand, is anything different? Have I chipped away at this? It's also kind of a nice way to make yourself feel like there's progress. You know, I had $28,000 in student loans three years ago. Hey, this is awesome. I'm at 22. Hopefully that's the right direction, right? Or maybe you're going to just take a look-see and say, hey, what's my cash look like? What's my cash on hand?