New year checklist: Help your employees get their finances into shape in 2025

id

Employees don’t need to wait until the new year to sort out their finances. Here are four things your employees could do now to get their finances in the best possible shape for 2025 and beyond.

id

January 1 can often be full of “new year, new you” promises, when it feels like the pressure’s on to get life sorted on a single day. For finances in particular, it can be an expensive and stressful time, and your employees may be struggling to juggle festive spending and higher heating bills as it is.

Rather than leaving everything to New Year’s Day, a better approach could be for your employees to get started on sorting their finances now. And the weeks leading up to the new year could be the ideal time for them to reflect and look ahead. 

With that in mind, here are four things your employees could do now to get their finances into the best possible shape for 2025:

• Get to know their finances better

A good place for employees to start is for them to get to know their finances better and spend some time planning.

Indeed, planning makes a big difference to people’s financial wellbeing. According to our Retirement Voice 2024 report, people who say they do a great deal of planning are more than twice as likely to feel good about their money than those who do nothing (68% vs. 30%).

To help, you can signpost your employees to easy-to-digest financial education content that aims to simplify planning and boost knowledge. MoneyHelper, for instance, provides impartial guidance on a wide range of financial topics, including everyday spending, buying a house, and saving into a pension. 

If your employees are with Standard Life for their workplace pension scheme, they can also get access to bitesize and jargon-free content from our financial wellbeing platform, Money Mindset. This gives employees a whole library of content at their fingertips, including tips, tools, and videos.

• Make the most of end-of-year bonus season

If your employees get an end-of-year bonus, they could keep more of it by using salary sacrifice – or ‘bonus sacrifice’ – to put some or all of it into their pension plan. 

Salary sacrifice means an employee agrees to reduce their salary – or in this case, their end-of-year bonus – in exchange for a pension contribution. And as their bonus payment is reduced, they’ll pay less in tax and National Insurance (NI). As a result, they get to keep more of bonus whilst still saving into their workplace pension scheme. 

Following the Autumn Budget announcements using salary sacrifice could be a particularly attractive option for employers too. As a reminder, employer NI is set to rise to 15% from April 2025, and the threshold at which NI gets paid is also going down from £9,100 per year to £5,000. So by using salary sacrifice, employers can offset these additional costs.

Salary sacrifice might not be right for everyone, so it’s important for employees to check. Read our article on bonus and salary sacrifice to learn more. 

• Start budgeting for next year

We know that planning can go a long way to helping people feel better about their money. So it’s a good idea to encourage employees to plan for the year ahead and start budgeting.

You can help them get started by pointing them towards tools and resources that make it easier for them to plan their day-to-day finances.

MoneyHelper, for instance, provides budgeting tools to help people break down and prioritise their spending, as well as savings calculators to help them work out how much money they could put away.

Standard Life workplace pension scheme members can also use Money Mindset to help them budget and plan ahead. Our platform allows employees to view all their financial accounts in one place, making it easier to see where their money’s going and helping them form healthy habits. They can also use our Budget Planner to organise their everyday spending and budget for the future. Plus, our Emergency Cash Fund Builder enables employees to set savings goals and set aside money for a rainy day.

• Bring pensions together

According to research by the Pensions Policy Institute (PPI), as of 2024 UK savers have misplaced 3.3 million pension pots – the equivalent of £31.1 billion in lost pension savings. 

It’s likely that some of your employees’ pension savings are lost or unclaimed, particularly those who’ve had a few jobs over years. So now could be a good time for employees to find any missing pensions and bring them together into one pot.

You can support employees by signposting them to tools that help them locate lost pensions, such as the Government’s Pension Tracing Service. Standard Life workplace pension scheme members can also use our Pension Finder tool, available through Money Mindset. This scans their employment history on LinkedIn to automatically search the Pension Tracing Service – making it quick and easy to find old pensions.

Once employees have found everything, they might want to consider transferring pensions into their Standard Life plan too. This could save them admin time and make it easier for them manage going forward.

Of course, it’s important that your employees think about if transferring is right for them. They’ll need to check they’re not giving up any valuable benefits or guarantees if they transfer, as they may want to keep these. Also, the value of investments can go down as well as up, and employees may get back less than was paid in.

For more insights on financial wellbeing, including resources on how you can help support your employees, visit our Financial Wellbeing hub and read our articles.

*Money Mindset is provided in partnership with Moneyhub Financial Technology Limited.