Whether it’s losing weight or giving up sweets or cigarettes, people are joining gyms, downloading apps, and buying gear to make goals possible. It's New Years Resolution time.

For some, this is the time to change the financial trajectory of your life. Maybe it’s time to get out of debt, to get your credit score higher than it’s ever been, or set up a system that helps you be ready for rainy days or future expenses.

As the new year starts, consider these moves to make it a new financial season:

Stop Using Your Credit Cards

For some people, the use of credit cards is all about the rewards. They use their miles or points to pay for vacations or major expenses. But for an unfortunate majority of people, credit cards are depended on to make ends meet every month. Balances grow, interest compounds, and minimum payment amounts increase. If you can take your credit card off the table as a source of income, you can slow things down a bit.

There are a few tips to making this easier…especially for the undisciplined shopper. Some people choose to keep using the credit card to pay their bills with an autopay feature, but they eliminate spontaneous or impulsive purchases with their credit cards. This allows them to still accrue miles or points but not spend more than they make. Other people make their credit card harder to access — by locking it in a lockbox or freezing it in a block of ice. This forces them to take a moment of pause before a purchase.

Start Paying Off Debt

If you’re familiar with Dave Ramsey and his Financial Peace University, you’ve probably heard of his principle of the Debt Snowball. One of the best ways to get control of your financial life is by getting ahead of your debt. By attacking your debt — one debt at a time — you can exponentially multiply your efforts and reduce the time it will take to get out from under the burden.

Don’t Spend More than You Make

It sounds simple…that one shouldn’t spend more than he or she makes. But that doesn’t make it easy. If you can only spend money that you have — and never spend money that you don’t have — you will enter a new financial season. It’s as close as you can get to a guarantee.

As the wheels of the new year start turning, consider that it’s not about a temporary resolution. It’s about a change of lifestyle. The healthier you are today, the better off you’ll be tomorrow.

At Viking Client Services, we help people clear their name of debt and help them reclaim control of their financial life. We’ve been doing it for more than half a century. To find out more about what we do and how we help companies do the good work they do, click here.