Expertise You Can Trust

At Cornerstone Capital, our team of seasoned financial advisors brings extensive knowledge and experience to the table. We understand the complexities of the financial markets and tailor our 2026 strategies to meet the unique needs of each client. Whether you are an individual planning for retirement or a business seeking to optimize investments, our experts provide clear, actionable guidance to help you achieve your 2026 financial goals.

See How You’re Doing

The beginning of a new year is a good time to see if you’re on track to hit your financial goals. If you’re still in accumulation mode, review how much of your salary you managed to save and invest last year; 15% is a reasonable minimum target, but reach for a higher percentage if you’re a higher-income person/household. Also, check on your progress toward your retirement savings: Fidelity has put together some helpful benchmarks. If you’re retired, review last year’s spending rate to make sure it passes the sniff test of safety. T. Rowe Price’s Retirement Income Calculator is a solid option for assessing whether your current strategy is on track—whether you’re still saving or already retired. I also like Vanguard’s simple Retirement Income Calculator. For a quick check on your withdrawal rate, required minimum distribution amounts can help. Morning star's recent retirement spending rate research can also help you benchmark.

Find Your Best Return on Investment

The most successful investors consider their total opportunity sets—including not just investments but also debt paydown. Are you deploying your money into those opportunities that promise the highest return on your investment? If you have high-interest-rate credit card debt, the answer is easy: You’d be hard-pressed to outearn that interest rate by investing in the market. On the other hand, you might reasonably expect to outearn your interest rate on other types of debt—such as mortgages—by investing, especially now that yields on safe(r) investments have come up. The right answers to these capital-allocation questions are individual-specific and depend on a number of factors: the interest rates on your debts versus your expected return on investments, your life stage, need for certainty (debt paydown carries a guaranteed return on investment), and any tax breaks you’re earning to borrow or invest. For younger investors with lower-rate mortgages and tax-sheltered investment options such as 401(k)s, investing will tend to deliver a higher ROI, albeit with less certainty, than prepaying mortgage debt. For older investors whose portfolios are more conservative, mortgage paydown is a more competitive use of funds and delivers a nice “peace of mind” dividend, too.

Revisit Retirement Plan Contributions

Contribution limits are nudging up a bit for company retirement plans this year. For 401(k)s, the limit is $24,500 for investors younger than 50, and $32,500 for those 50 and older. Plus, retirement savers, who will be between 60 and 63, can make additional catch-up contributions in 2026; the all-in limit for that group is $35,750. New rules also go into effect in 2026 for catch-up retirement plan contributions for higher-income workers; catch-ups must go into Roth accounts.

For IRAs, the limits are going up a bit—$7,500 for people under 50, and $8,600 for those 50-plus. If you’re not making the maximum allowable contributions to those accounts, see if you can’t find room in your budget to elevate how much you’re putting in. If you have a high income and earn a bonus, just be sure not to run into the high-class problem of contributing too much too early to earn full matching contributions. While you’re at it, consider putting your other investment contributions—to your IRA, for example—on autopilot via automatic withdrawals from your checking or savings accounts. That is apt to help your long-term investment results versus waiting until April to make an IRA contribution, and spreading out your investments helps ensure you don’t skip that contribution altogether. Contributing $625 per month will get investors under 50 to the $7,500-per-year IRA maximum, whereas IRA investors over 50 will need to contribute $716 a month to make it to their $8,600 maximum allowable amount.

Important date: Jan. 15 is your deadline for paying your estimated taxes for the fourth quarter of 2025 if you are self-employed or retired and don’t have taxes withheld from your IRA withdrawals.

Conduct a Review of Your Investments

If you undertook a portfolio review at the end of 2025, there’s no need to go back through it. But if you haven’t checked up on your investments for a while, it’s a good time to check your portfolio’s exposure to the major asset classes. Thanks to stocks’ fine showing so far this decade, many investors are apt to find themselves heavy on stocks relative to their targets.

Check in With Your Tax Professional and Gather Tax Documentation

Tax Day will be here before you know it. That means it’s not too early to start gathering your tax-related paperwork (either physical or virtual)—especially 1099s listing any income or gains your holdings have paid out. If you’re considering itemizing your deductions, remember that they must exceed the standard deduction to be worthwhile. For the 2025 tax year, the standard deduction is $15,750 for individuals and $31,500 for married couples filing jointly. Plus, single taxpayers over age 65, or those who are blind, get an additional standard deduction of $2,000 in 2025; that figure is $1,600 per person for married people filing joint returns. Taxpayers over age 65 get an additional $6,000 deduction regardless of whether they take the standard deduction or itemize; it’s $6,000 for singles and $12,000 for married couples who are both over age 65, provided their income comes in under the thresholds.

Take a Good Look at 1099s and W-2s

As these documents roll in, take a moment to gather some intelligence from these numbers before stashing them in a file or copying them onto your tax return. Your 1099 and W-2s provide valuable information about your earnings and investing habits. If your salary has increased, have you also increased your savings rate, including your 401(k) contribution? That information is available on your W-2. If you receive piddling levels of income from a number of cash accounts, can you wring a higher level of income from an online savings account? (Yields have gotten much better!) If your mutual funds made sizable capital gains distributions, would you be better off holding tax-friendly index funds or exchange-traded funds in your taxable account?

Be Generous

If giving financial gifts to loved ones is on your to-do list, you can be exceptionally generous without making your estate susceptible to the gift tax. For 2026, each individual can gift up to $19,000 per person per year without having to file a gift-tax return, and all but ultrawealthy, ultragenerous people will never pay gift tax during or after their lifetimes. Year-end is also a good time to squeak in charitable contributions that may lower your tax bill. Investors who are age 70.5 or older can also direct distributions from their IRAs to charity via a qualified charitable distribution, reducing their taxable income for the year and also reducing the amount of their portfolios that are subject to RMDs in the future.

Conduct a Year-End Portfolio Review

While you’ve no doubt paid some attention to your portfolio throughout the year, year-end is a good time to give it a thorough checkup. If you own investments in your taxable account that have lost value, selling to generate a tax loss is a way to find a silver lining. The 0% long-term capital gains rate is also in effect for 2026, so investors whose income puts them under the thresholds may be able to engage in tax-gain harvesting. And investors at all income levels can improve their portfolios by repositioning within their tax-sheltered accounts, where they’ll pay no taxes following changes as long as the money stays inside the account.

Take Your Required Minimum Distributions

If you’re of RMD age (73), you know the drill: Dec. 31 is your deadline for taking RMDs from your tax-deferred accounts, such as IRAs and 401(k)s. Affluent retirees love to hate their RMDs, but I always recommend that retirees trim their distributions from holdings they wanted to prune anyway—positions that have grown too large, for example, or funds and stocks that have outlived their usefulness. Doing so has the potential to improve your portfolio. If you’re in the enviable position of not needing your RMDs to live on, consider steering a portion of the distribution, up to $111,000 in 2026, to charity via the qualified charitable distribution maneuver.