The ninety-minute money meeting that runs your whole year

Quick answer: Once a year, sit down for ninety minutes with your spouse (or a trusted person, if you're single). Check five numbers. Change two or three things at most. Write down what you're deliberately leaving alone. Then close the folder until next year.

This is general education, not individual financial, tax or legal advice. For decisions about your own situation, talk to a CPA, a fee-only planner or an attorney.

Pick a date and protect it

Choose a fixed time. Late January works because last year's paperwork has arrived. The week after you file your taxes works too. What matters is that it's on the calendar, not "sometime when things calm down." Things don't calm down.

Set it at the kitchen table, not in the car, not at ten at night. Bring last year's tax return, your most recent statements for every account, your pay stub, and your insurance declarations pages. Put it all in one folder. Use a paper one if you like. The folder is half the discipline.

If you're married, both of you attend. Not one person reporting to the other. A household where only one spouse knows where everything is has a single point of failure, and it fails at the worst possible time.

The five numbers

Write each one on a sheet of paper next to last year's. Trend matters more than the figure.

1. Net worth. Everything you own that has a cash value, minus everything you owe. Home at a realistic sale value, not your hopeful one. If it's up, good. If it's down, find out why before you do anything else.

2. Savings rate. Dollars saved over the year divided by gross income. Include retirement contributions and any employer match. If you earned $78,000 and put away $9,360, that's 12 percent. The number to beat is last year's.

3. Emergency fund in months. Take your essential monthly costs: housing, food, utilities, insurance, minimum debt payments, transportation. Say it's $4,200. Divide your cash reserve by that. $12,600 is three months. If a single income supports the household, lean toward the longer end of the usual three-to-six range. Why this money is insurance and not savings is covered in your emergency fund is insurance, not savings.

4. Debt, by interest rate. List every balance with its rate. A $6,000 card balance at 22 percent costs roughly $1,300 a year in interest if you carry it. A car loan at 5 percent costs a fraction of that. Order matters, and the arithmetic is laid out in paying off debt in the order the arithmetic says.

5. What you actually spent. Not what you budgeted. Pull twelve months of statements and total the big categories. You'll find one that surprised you. Everyone does. Last year it was a subscription nobody remembered. Maybe this year it's eating out.

What to adjust

Look at the five numbers and pick the one or two that moved the wrong way. Fix those. Not all five.

Raise your savings rate by one point. If you got a raise, give half of it to savings before it reaches your checking account. You never miss money you never saw. A 3 percent raise on $78,000 is $2,340 a year. Send $1,170 of it to work.

Check your payroll withholding. A big refund means you lent the government money at zero percent. A big bill means you've underpaid during the year. Either one is a sign your paycheck setup is off. Your payslip, your tax code, and where the money went walks through reading it line by line.

Rebid the insurance you've never shopped. Auto and homeowners policies drift upward. Get two competing quotes with identical coverage. Twenty minutes on the phone can save a few hundred dollars, and it's the only item on this list that pays you directly for the time.

Update beneficiaries. On retirement accounts and life insurance, the beneficiary form generally overrides your will. Marriages, births and deaths change who should be on it. If a former spouse or a deceased parent is still listed, fix it this week. Then check whether your coverage still matches your family's size, which how much life insurance you need, and what kind to buy covers.

Check what you're paying in fees. A fund charging 1 percent a year on $200,000 costs $2,000 annually. A similar fund at 0.1 percent costs $200. Look at the expense ratio on every fund you own. It's printed on the statement or the fund's page.

Set each person's no-questions money. Agree on a monthly amount each spouse can spend without explaining it. Two hundred dollars, five hundred, whatever fits. It removes a lot of small arguments.

What to leave alone

This is the part most people skip, and it's where most of the damage gets done.

Your investment mix, unless your life changed. A new baby, a job loss, a retirement date moving closer: those are reasons to revisit. A bad quarter on the news is not. People who sell after a drop turn a paper loss into a real one. Rebalance if a holding has drifted far from your target. Otherwise leave it.

Your mortgage, unless the math is clear. Refinancing has closing costs. Divide those costs by your monthly savings. That's how many months until you break even. If you might move before then, skip it.

Anything somebody pitched you at a barbecue. A cousin's can't-miss deal, a coworker's coin, a friend's seminar. If you don't understand how it makes money in plain English, it doesn't go in the folder. A loan to a relative deserves the same test. Only lend what you can afford to never see again. Saying no kindly is not unkind.

A budget that's working. If you spent within your means and hit your savings number, don't rebuild the spreadsheet because a video told you to. Boring is the goal.

Two small things that count

Pay back anything you owe a person, whether it's a friend's loan or your brother-in-law's cash from the spring, before they have to mention it. Do it at the meeting and put it on the calendar.

And decide on your giving for the year, if you give. Pick a number now, so it's a plan and not a mood.

Write the page

End the meeting with one sheet. Top: the five numbers with this year's beside last year's. Middle: the two or three changes, each with a name and a date. Bottom: three things you decided to leave alone.

Put it in the front of the folder. That sheet is the entire meeting, and next January you'll open it first. If it's a good one, it will make you a little proud and a little bored. Take both.