The end of the year presents a natural opportunity to pause, reflect, and take stock of where you've been and where you're headed. But meaningful financial reflection goes far beyond simply checking your bank account balance or calculating your net worth growth.
Here are four essential areas to consider as you close out 2025 and prepare for 2026.
Before diving into spreadsheets and numbers, start with the bigger picture: Did you live the lifestyle you wanted to this year?
This question matters more than most people realize. It's easy to get caught up in the daily grind—waking up, going to work, managing the practice, paying bills, and repeating. But at the end of the day, what are we doing this all for?
Take time to honestly assess whether 2025 rolled out the way you hoped it would from a lifestyle standpoint. Did you take in the experiences you wanted? Did you spend quality time with your kids? Did you nurture your relationship with your partner? Do you have meaningful connections with friends and family?
If the answer is yes to most of these questions, you're probably doing a lot of things right—regardless of what your financial statements say.
Consider the season you're in. Not everyone approaches year-end reflection from the same place. You might be someone who naturally sets goals and crushes them year after year. Or you might be in a season where simply surviving feels like an accomplishment—and that's okay.
Maybe you have young kids at home and your primary goal is maintaining your sanity and keeping your marriage strong. Perhaps you're dealing with aging parents, navigating a business transition, or recovering from burnout. These are legitimate priorities that sometimes take precedence over financial milestones.
The key is awareness and alignment with the life you actually want to live. Did your spending decisions align with your values? Did they contribute to you living an enjoyable life? If not, what needs to adjust?
Important note: Be objective in your reflection. What's done is done. You can't change the past six months, but you can let that experience inform your decision-making going forward. Don't get hung up on what happened—focus on what you learned and how you want to move forward.
Once you've reflected on the lifestyle piece, it's time to look at the data. Year-end is the perfect time to update your net worth statement—not from a judgment standpoint, but simply to understand: Where was I 12 months ago, and where am I now?
Key metrics to track:
This last metric—your savings rate—can be particularly illuminating. It gives you a clear picture of how much of your income you're actually keeping versus spending.
The beauty of this exercise is that many people discover they're doing better than they thought. Those small, incremental actions you took throughout the year—like an automated $100 monthly contribution to your TFSA—might not feel significant in the moment. But $1,200 at the end of the year? That's progress worth acknowledging.
For early-career chiropractors: If you're still carrying student loans or aren't saving and investing as much as you'd like, pay attention to how much debt you've paid down. You might not feel that progress month to month when you're just making payments, but seeing that you've knocked off $25,000 or $30,000 from your net worth perspective? That's real, meaningful progress you should feel good about.
Even if you only do this exercise once a year, year-end is the ideal time to check in and see where you stand. Use this data to inform potential opportunities for the new year—maybe you can bump up your savings rate, or perhaps you can make your saving and investing more automated rather than reactive.
Here's an important truth: Net worth is just a data point. It's not a judgment on your worth as a person or your success in life.
A slower financial year—or even a worse year than you anticipated—does not equal failure. There are countless factors outside your control that can impact your financial results. And there are equally important non-financial indicators that contribute to your wellbeing, financial security, and overall happiness.
Consider these alternative measures of financial progress:
All of these represent tangible, positive progress—even if your net worth didn't grow as much as you hoped.
Remember: It's uncommon for all areas of life to flourish simultaneously. Typically, one or two areas experience significant growth while others remain stagnant or even decline. Maybe this year you needed to prioritize your health, or focus on your young kids, or support aging parents, or navigate a business transition, or simply recover from burnout.
Everyone's situation is unique, and that's the key point. Your progress is not linear—rarely is it linear. And most importantly: Your net worth is not the same as your self worth.
The less your identity is tied to money—your net worth, income, the car you drive, or the clothes you wear—the better off you'll typically be. Those can be small pieces of who you are, but they shouldn't define how you want to be thought of or how you think of yourself.
Good intentions and willpower alone won't necessarily get you where you want to be 12 months from now. What you need are systems.
You don't plan to fail—you fail to the level of your systems. Or put another way: you rise to the level of your systems.
Start with clarity on your goals:
Once you have clarity on these goals, you can translate them into the right systems and processes. This includes determining how much you can realistically save and invest, and getting those contributions automated.
The power of automation cannot be overstated. Systems like Profit First for your practice or a structured personal cash flow system require significant upfront work. But once they're in place, they become dramatically easier to manage compared to the traditional approach of checking your bank account balance and making reactive decisions.
Without a plan or structure for how financial decisions get made throughout the year, you're constantly reacting:
When you're making these decisions reactively month after month, year after year, it becomes nearly impossible to predict where you'll end up in 12 months—let alone 10, 15, or 20 years from now when you're thinking about retirement.
The right systems remove this uncertainty. They take the decision-making burden off your shoulders and create a clear path forward, making it far more likely you'll actually achieve your goals.
As you head into 2026, remember that meaningful financial progress isn't just about the numbers on your net worth statement. It's about living a life aligned with your values, building systems that support your goals, and recognizing that different seasons call for different priorities.
Take time to reflect honestly on where you've been, assess where you are objectively, and build the systems that will support where you want to go.
Your future self will thank you for it.
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