CHICAGO – With holiday credit card bills starting to roll in, you might want to shift your New Year’s resolution from your waistline to your wallet.

In a Fox 32 money saver special report, we asked the experts for a little help on how to boost your finances in 2025.

SMART MONEY MOVES

Why you should care:

“Some of the resolutions, some of the tips we would recommend for your New Year resolutions, financially, is to plan for retirement,” said Chip Lupo, a writer and analyst at WalletHub.

Lupo said it’s critically important that you begin to build an emergency fund to avoid relying on high-interest credit cards during life’s unexpected moments.

“We’re in a situation now where, because of the inflationary economy, people are now relying on credit cards for everyday expenses when the primary objective of a credit card for most people is to have basically an emergency fund,” Lupo said.

Lupo said that wages aren’t keeping up with the rate of inflation, and people are turning to credit cards for the essentials such as food and gas, which leads to significant debt by the end of the year.

“I think a big area that lot of consumers can agree on was the rising living costs,” said consumer finance expert Andrea Woroch. “Inflation impacting how much they’re spending on housing, transportation, groceries as well as even health care.”

MAKE A GAME PLAN

What you can do:

Woroch said you need to get back to the basics – set a budget this year and follow it.

“A lot of people think of a budget as being really restrictive and while it does cap you on spending in certain areas, a budget allows you to see where you are potentially wasting money on things you don’t need,” Woroch said.

If you think setting up a budget can be overwhelming, Woroch said going into debt and having no money in savings can be even worse.

Not to mention, there are digital tools and apps to help you set a budget, like the “You Need a Budget” app, or YNAB.

“Saying you are going to pay off debt is not enough. You have to be specific with how much debt you are going to pay off and set a realistic goal,” Woroch said.

When you take on this financial resolution, Woroch said it’s important to have a plan in place. Use a balance transfer credit card or pay off the smallest balance first.

If you don’t have a plan, Woroch said you will likely just continue your cycle of debt.

Another tip from our experts, they both recommended taking advantage of the high interest rates being offered with online bank accounts or CD’s.

A pair of voting advocacy groups founded by failed Democrat Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams were hit with a historic fine by the Georgia Ethics Commission for violating campaign finance laws to bolster Abram’s 2018 election.  

“Today the State Ethics Commission entered into a consent agreement with the New Georgia Project and the New Georgia Project Action Fund for a total of $300,000,” the Georgia State Ethics Commission posted in a statement on Wednesday. “This certainly represents the largest fine imposed in the history of Georgia’s Ethics Commission, but it also appears to be the largest ethics fine ever imposed by any state ethics commission in the country related to an election and campaign finance case.”

Abrams founded the New Georgia Project in 2013 as part of an effort to register more minority voters and young voters. The organization was founded as a charity that can accept tax-deductible donations, while the New Georgia Project Action Fund worked as the organization’s fundraising arm. 

The groups admitted to failing to disclose about $4.2 million in contributions and $3.2 million in expenditures that were used during Abram’s election efforts in 2018, according to the commission’s consent order. The groups were hit with a total of 16 violations, including failing to register as a political committee and failure to disclose millions of dollars in political contributions.

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The groups were accused of carrying out similar activity in 2019, when they reportedly failed to disclose $646,000 in contributions and $174,000 while advocating for a ballot initiative. 

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“This represents the largest and most significant instance of an organization illegally influencing our statewide elections in Georgia that we have ever discovered, and I believe this sends a clear message to both the public and potential bad actors moving forward that we will hold you accountable,” the ethics commission continued in its statement Wednesday. 

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Abrams stepped down from the group in 2017, with Sen. Raphael Warnock taking the reins as the New Georgia Project’s CEO from 2017 to 2019, the Associated Press reported. Warnock was elected as a U.S. senator from Georgia in 2020. 

Democrat Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock, who also serves as the head pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, speaks from the pulpit. (Paras Griffin/Getty Images/File)

A spokesperson for Warnock’s Senate office told the AP that he was working “as a longtime champion for voting rights” and that he was not aware of campaign violations. The spokesperson added that “compliance decisions were not a part of that work.” Fox Digital also reached out to Warnock’s office for additional comment but did not immediately receive a reply. 

Abrams ran for governor of Georgia in 2018 and 2022, but lost to Republican Gov. Brian Kemp in both races. Abrams drew national attention after the 2018 race when she refused to concede to the Republican despite losing by 60,000 votes. 

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Amid the 2018 race, she touted the New Georgia Project on her X account, which was called Twitter at the time.

“When Abrams sees a problem, she doesn’t wait for someone else to step up – she does it herself. So when she saw that 800,000 people of color in Georgia weren’t registered to vote, Abrams immediately set out to fix the problem & founded The New GA Project,” she tweeted. 

The New Georgia Project said in a comment provided to Fox News Digital that they are “glad to finally put this matter behind us” so the group can “fully devote its time and attention to its efforts to civically engage and register black, brown, and young voters in Georgia.”

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“While we remain disappointed that the federal court ruling on the constitutionality of the Georgia Government Transparency and Campaign Finance Act was overturned on entirely procedural grounds, we accept this outcome and are eager to turn the page on activities that took place more than five years ago,” the group continued. 

As head of trade and working capital solutions within Citi Services, Chris Cox and his team support multinational and institutional clients across core trade, supply chain finance, trade loans and export agency finance. In an exclusive interview with Euromoney, Cox sheds some light on the competitive advantage of this business and key strategic priorities.

Before leading the trade business, Cox was global head of data, digitalisation and strategic projects for securities services, so the digitisation of the trade finance space is a subject close to his heart.

“For supply chain finance, we have a global platform that we integrate clients into,” he explains. “The speed at which you can onboard suppliers obviously translates directly into the speed at which you can get finance for those suppliers. So we have done a lot of work to modernise that platform, and it will roll out more extensively in the first half of next year.”

Citi