Tired of the same old New Year's resolutions? Weight loss takes a lot of work and more willpower than most of us have. My resolution last year was to stop swearing and well... that didn't happen.

So if you're looking for a good new resolution for 2007, I got one for you. Morningstar.com made a list of some of the top investment books of all time for their last-minute gift ideas, and reading them all would make just about anyone a good investor. I'm embarrassed to admit that I've read almost every book on their list, and they are all good reads, and full of wisdom.

Some of my favorites from their list:

• Michael Lewis's Moneyball: Oakland A's general Manager Billy Bean has made such an impact with his reliance on computers for analyzing players and his penchant for finding value where others see nothing that he was a speaker at T. Rowe Price's annual investment symposium. The Financial Times did a write-up on it, and it's easy to see how applicable his philosophy for baseball is to investing.
• Pat Dorsey's The Five Rules for Successful Stock Investing: This provides awesome information on how to do bottom-up analysis in stocks in a great variety of industries, including banking, health care, energy, and utilities. I don't know of any other book where you can get this level of detail in a readable manner on so many different industries. It also has an excellent introduction to fundamental analysis (good explanations of concepts like the moat, margin of safety, and various valuation metrics).
• Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes: This is the classic introduction to the field of behavioral finance written by one of its pioneers. What do the last three digits of your phone number have to with when Genghis Khan was born? Find out in this book.

I'm not a fan of making resolutions on January 1; I believe, if something about your life needs to change, it should just change now. And yet, every year, I get caught up in the spirit of the season of new beginnings, and start dreaming about how great I will be when I start doing yoga regularly, eating a green vegetable every day, and sitting down to a family meal together (without TV!) at least once a week.

Financial resolutions, however, make ever-so-much sense to coincide with hanging your brand-new calendar. A new year often means a new salary and perhaps a new bouncing baby tax deduction, and is a great time to re-evaluate your investments. But a few commitments stand out as being so brilliantly beneficial and (often) easy that most of us would do well to adopt them:

1. Contribute to your company's 401(k), or an individual IRA. If your company has a 401(k) plan and you're not contributing, well, get thee to an election form immediately! 401(k) contributions are pre-tax, so for someone in my (average) tax bracket, a $150 monthly contribution only takes about $100 from my paycheck -- an amount roughly equal to the amount of money I would have wasted, was it there in my bank account instead of silently creating wealth for me. If you're already contributing, consider increasing your contribution by a percentage point or two; likely, you'll barely notice it.

2. Evaluate your 401(k) or IRA investing decisions. I managed the 401(k) plan for my small company about five years ago, and was amazed to find that I was the only one who made any investment choices with my money; every other employee had his or her money sitting in the default option, a money market fund (most yield only a few percentage points a year, often less than inflation). If you have any money in your 401(k), pick something, even if it's a very conservative mutual fund or bond fund.

If you've made an election in the past, but your entire retirement portfolio is in one bond fund or (yikes!) 100% invested in your company's stock, take a look at the options and diversify a bit. Ideally, you'd have three or four different funds in your 401(k) or IRA, if you can't invest in individual stocks -- and, even though I haven't always followed this advice, after the Enron saga I'd never invest more than 20% of my portfolio in one stock (yes, especially your employer's stock).