 |
|
|
|||||
The start of a new year usually brings new motivation to achieve goals like eating healthier or finally cleaning your basement. Many resolutions also focus on financial goals, such as paying off credit card debt, saving for a new house, or simply getting more educated about money. New Years is a really good time to review and realign your financial goals overall, said Erica Grundza, certified financial planner at Betterment, an investing and savings app. When building your goals for 2026, Grundza recommends focusing less on the past and more on an optimistic, yet realistic, vision for the future. She recommends that you focus on reestablishing the why behind your approach to money and how you want to make it work for your life. This can be as simple as saving $10 each week in a savings account, or a bigger goal like saving to buy a house in the coming years. Its all about your own journey. The Associated Press spoke with people who are making financial resolutions for 2026. Heres a look at what theyre planning and how you can draw inspiration for your own resolutions: Making achievable plans Resolutions can easily turn into unattainable goals that feel more like a dream, said MarieYolaine Toms, a coach and founder of Focused Fire, a financial coaching company. To avoid setting unrealistic expectations, Toms follows a no resolutions mindset and instead focuses on making an actionable plan. What I say every year is that I am not making resolutions, Im making plans that can be tracked forward, traced back, and tweaked until completion, Toms said. Recently, Toms encouraged her clients to check their credit report with the three credit bureaus and, based on their credit reports, make an attainable plan to start a savings account. For example, adding $25 to their savings account every week. Whether youre trying to pay off debt or save for a vacation abroad, the first step towards making a plan can be creating a budget. When making a budget, its best to find a technique that works for you, whether its the classic 50/30/20 plan or another budgeting style. If youre building a budget for the first time, you can find some expert recommendations here. Paying off debt After losing her job as a magazine editor in September, Rachel Pelovitz, 33, had to take a closer look at her finances. Having acquired a significant amount of debt over the last few years due to her husbands year-and-a-half-long unemployment, Pelovitz explored several options to pay it off. Ultimately, Pelovitz and her husband chose to sell their house and work with a debt consolidation organization. Rather than rely on getting more debt, we are currently selling our house, Pelovitz said. Pelovitzs main goal for 2026 is to pay off half of her credit card debt. And, with some of the money from selling the house, start investing moderately. If youve also experienced a layoff, you can read expert recommendations to help you take care of your finances and your mental health here. Building a savings account For Jenni Lee, 27, this is going to be the year when she gets strict about building her savings account. While Lee considers herself generally good with money, over the last six months she has overspent and wants to rein it in. The long-term goal for her savings journey is for Lee to buy a house. Im now in my late 20s, Im starting to really think about where I pinch now so it wont hurt later when I finally decide to purchase and own a place, said Lee, a tech worker and lifestyle TikTok creator based in Chicago. As she saves for her future home and possibly a trip to South Korea, Lee wants to cut unnecessary spending on clothing items and eating out. Social media microtrends are a common influence on peoples shopping decisions, and this can lead to overspending. If youre looking to avoid spending money on microtrends, you can find experts recommendations here. Building an emergency fund If you are in a position to do so, having multiple financial goals youre working towards at the same time can be a great way to speed up your progress. For Worcester resident Melanie Duarte, 23, her New Years money goals include paying off her student loans and credit card debt while building an emergency fund. I made sure to include it in my budget, even if its something as small as like $50. I just want to make sure I still put something in (my emergency fund) so that it eventually multiplies, said Duarte, who owns a marketing agency. Duartes family didnt speak openly about finances when she was growing up. But, since she opened her own business, Duarte has been slowly working on rewriting her relationship with money. If youre looking to start an emergency fund or create better habits while you save, you can read some experts recommendations here. Finding balance Finding a balance between saving for your long-term goals while also making sure you enjoy your money is important, but it can also be challenging. After the death of her grandfather just a few years after retirement, Tiana Stewart, 26, felt that he didnt get to enjoy the fruits of his labor. So, this past year, Stewart decided to enjoy her life and travel. I do understand saving for retirement is important, but I also want to enjoy my life and the money that I work for at this time, especially being in my 20s, said Stewart, who lives in Maryland. But now, as she reflects on her financial future, Stewart wants to focus on paying off debt, saving, and investing. Having a healthy balance between enjoying life and saving for the future is what she wants to work toward. For some, participating in budgeting challenges such as the no-buy year can be a great way to set boundaries on your spending and set aside money towards your financial goals. Many people start such challenges at the beginning of the year and commit to keep going until the end, but others start with a no-buy month. __ The Associated Press receives support from Charles Schwab Foundation for educational and explanatory reporting to improve financial literacy. The independent foundation is separate from Charles Schwab and Co. Inc. The AP is solely responsible for its journalism.
Category:
E-Commerce
The Trump administration will award each U.S. state between $147 million and $281 million in 2026 under a new rural health transformation program aimed at improving access to care and service quality, a senior White House aide said on Monday. The initiative, authorized under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, will provide $50 billion over five fiscal years. It will make $10 billion available each year from fiscal 2026 through fiscal 2030 for all 50 states. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz said the fund is intended to improve rural health outcomes that have worsened over decades, while avoiding costly new construction. “This is a massive effort to change the unfortunate reality that has overtaken rural healthcare in America, which is that your ZIP code has started to predict your life expectancy,” Oz told reporters. He said the money will also support other pilot projects across the country. Officials said they will allocate half the funding equally among states, with the remaining $25 billion distributed based on factors tied to rural health systems, state policy actions, and initiatives states propose in their applications. Administration officials also said they will recoup funds if states fail to meet certain criteria or do not carry out pledged actions. “The purpose of this $50 billion investment in rural healthcare is not to pay off bills,” Oz said. “The purpose of this $50 billion investment is to allow us to right-size the system and to deal with the fundamental hindrances of improvement in rural healthcare.” The rollout comes as President Donald Trump faces weak approval ratings, with inflation and cost-of-living concerns dominating voters’ minds ahead of next year’s congressional elections. Trump performed strongly with rural voters, who made up about 36% of his voters in the 2024 presidential election, compared with 16% for his Democratic rival Kamala Harris, according to the Pew Research Center. Moderate Republicans, who are pivotal to maintaining the party’s razor-thin majority in Congress, face added pressure as the House has not extended enhanced Affordable Care Act premium subsidies, leaving many marketplace enrollees projected to see higher premiums starting January 1. Andrea Shalal and Sriparna Roy, Reuters
Category:
E-Commerce
Robots have long been seen as a bad bet for Silicon Valley investors too complicated, capital-intensive, and boring, honestly, says venture capitalist Modar Alaoui. But the commercial boom in artificial intelligence has lit a spark under long-simmering visions to build humanoid robots that can move their mechanical bodies like humans and do things that people do. Alaoui, founder of the Humanoids Summit, gathered more than 2,000 people this week, including top robotics engineers from Disney, Google, and dozens of startups, to showcase their technology and debate what it will take to accelerate a nascent industry. Alaoui says many researchers now believe humanoids or some other kind of physical embodiment of AI are going to become the norm.” The question is really just how long it will take, he said. Disney’s contribution to the field, a walking robotic version of Frozen character Olaf, will be roaming on its own through Disneyland theme parks in Hong Kong and Paris early next year. Entertaining and highly complex robots that resemble a human or a snowman are already here, but the timeline for general purpose robots that are a productive member of a workplace or household is farther away. Even at a conference designed to build enthusiasm for the technology, held at a Computer History Museum that’s a temple to Silicon Valley’s previous breakthroughs, skepticism remained high that truly humanlike robots will take root anytime soon. The humanoid space has a very, very big hill to climb, said Cosima du Pasquier, co-founder of Haptica Robotics, which works to give robots a sense of touch. There’s a lot of research that still needs to be solved. The Stanford University postdoctoral researcher came to the conference in Mountain View, California, just a week after incorporating her startup. The first customers are really the people here, she said. Researchers at the consultancy McKinsey & Company have counted about 50 companies around the world that have raised at least $100 million to develop humanoids, led by about 20 in China and 15 in North America. China is leading in part due to government incentives for component production and robot adoption and a mandate last year to have a humanoid ecosystem established by 2025, said McKinsey partner Ani Kelkar. Displays by Chinese firms dominated the expo section of this week’s summit, held Thursday and Friday. The conference’s most prevalent humanoids were those made by China’s Unitree, in part because researchers in the U.S. buy the relatively cheap model to test their own software. In the U.S., the advent of generative AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini has jolted the decades-old robotics industry in different ways. Investor excitement has poured money into ambitious startups aiming to build hardware that will bring a physical presence to the latest AI. But it’s not just crossover hype the same technical advances that made AI chatbots so good at language have played a role in teaching robots how to get better at performing tasks. Paired with computer vision, robots powered by visual-language models are trained to learn about their surroundings. One of the most prominent skeptics is robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks, a co-founder of Roomba vacuum maker iRobot who wrote in September that todays humanoid robots will not learn how to be dexterous despite the hundreds of millions, or perhaps many billions of dollars, being donated by VCs and major tech companies to pay for their training. Brooks didn’t attend but his essay was frequently mentioned. Also missing was anyone speaking for Tesla CEO Elon Musks development of a humanoid called Optimus, a project that the billionaire is designing to be extremely capable and sold in high volumes. Musk said three years ago that people can probably buy an Optimus within three to five years. The conference’s organizer, Alaoui, founder and general partner of ALM Ventures, previously worked on driver attention systems for the automotive industry and sees parallels between humanoids and the early years of self-driving cars. Near the entrance to the summit venue, just blocks from Google’s headquarters, is a museum exhibit showing Google’s bubble-shaped 2014 prototype of a self-driving car. Eleven years later, robotaxis operated by Google affiliate Waymo are constantly plying the streets nearby. Some robots with human elements are already being tested in workplaces. Oregon-based Agility Robotics announced shortly before the conference that it is bringing its tote-carrying warehouse robot Digit to a Texas distribution facility run by Mercado Libre, the Latin American e-commerce giant. Much like the Olaf robot, it has inverted legs that are more birdlike than human. Industrial robots performing single tasks are already commonplace in car assembly and other manufacturing. They work with a level of speed and precision thats difficult for todays humanoids or humans themselves to match. The head of a robotics trade group founded in 1974 is now lobbying the U.S. government to develop a stronger national strategy to advance the development of homegrown robots, be they humanoids or otherwise. We have a lot of strong technology, we have the AI expertise here in the U.S., said Jeff Burnstein, president of the Association for Advancing Automation, after touring the expo. So I think it remains to be seen who is the ultimate leader in this. But right now, China has certainly a lot more momentum on humanoids. Matt O’Brien, AP technology writer Associated Press journalist Terry Chea contributed to this report.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||