When a new year is upon us I use that time to look over my current investments and plan for the next year.
Rebalance
Have a look at rebalancing your portfolio. Stocks and bonds grow (and fall) at different rates. If your risk preference is to have a stock to bond allocation of 60/40, there’s a good chance that it’s no longer 60/40. If it has grown to 65/35, you might consider rebalancing back to 60/40. Nothing fancy needs to be done, and I don’t recommend doing it very often, but use your birthday or the first of the year to check in and rebalance as necessary.
If you have funds that are both in taxable accounts and tax protected retirement accounts, only rebalance what’s in your IRA/HSA/401k. Doing so will save on any capital gains taxation when you exchange in a brokerage account.
Front Load the IRA’s
On January 2nd, you can put in $6,000 into your IRA, and six thousand more for a spouse. You can put in an extra $1,000 when age 50+. These limits often go up every year or so. One way to do this is put in money each month, and that’s pretty common. I’m not a fan of common, though. 
What we do is pay ourselves $1,000 each month, so that at the end of the year, we already have $12k to put it all in on day one, January 2nd. This is called front loading and it get’s all $12k working for us all year, instead of just a bit each month. History has shown that this pays off way more often than it doesn’t. When you get a large enough taxable account, just buy $1k/mo in a tax efficient mutual fund like VTSAX, and then sell some of your shares to fund your IRAs. Prior to having a large taxable account, just save the money in a money market or CD.
It does take a bit of initial saving to get the front loading plan to work. Get in the habit of front loading, and it will help you ensure you properly fund your retirement accounts prior to spending it on other projects that always tend to come up.
Remember: You never earn too much to make use of an IRA!
Employer Plans
Finally, have a look at your workplace 401(k). Make sure you are happy with the investment choices you are currently investing in. Are the fees on the funds less than 0.25%? Do you even know what fees you are paying? Choose passive, broad index based funds with the lowest fees if you want the best long term gains. Do a rebalance if you need to. Also check to make sure you are contributing as much as you can afford into this account. Again, front loading works great here. But at an absolute minimum, make sure you contribute enough to capture any and all employer matching funds.
Often times, employers have access to institutional shares that have lower expense ratios than you will have access to in an IRA or taxable account. What does this mean? Buy the funds in the accounts where they are cheapest. I invest in three funds: A Total US stock index fund, a Total International stock index fund, and a Total US bond index fund. Simple. The bond and international fund is 4x cheaper to buy in my 401(k) than it is in our Roth IRA’s. Therefore, I only buy the Total US stock index fund in our Roth’s and buy the international and bond fund in my 401(k) to get to the stock/bond allocation I’m happy with.
Happy investing, and cheers to a new year!