A Tentative Personal Finance Blog

What are your financial goals? If you are like most people, you may have a general idea of what financial goals you’d like to achieve, but you haven’t taken the time to truly form a plan to achieve them. If you don’t know exactly what your financial goals are or how you’re going to attain them, it’s going to be quite difficult to achieve them. The obvious step is to form a plan to reach these goals. Here is one way to go about doing that:

Step 1. Identify your financial goals Write them down. One example of a financial goal might be to eliminate credit card debt. Whatever your financial goals are, take a day to list them so you know exactly what you want to achieve financially in your life.

Step 2. Set parameters If your financial goal is to eliminate credit card debt, your may define the time limit as “eliminate credit card debt in 3 years.” You also need to set a monetary goal. In this case it would be the amount you owed on your credit cards plus interest.

Step 3. Write a detailed plan Create a step-by-step map of how you’re going to reach that goal. For your credit card debt, you can choose a snowball debt reduction method. that best fits your personality. Then you need to figure out how you are going to pay for that plan. Assuming that you have credit card debt of $5000 plus interest, you could shoot for a minimum of $5 a day to reach this goal.

To reach the $5 a day monetary goal, you could eat out one less time per week, wash your clothes in cold instead of hot water or negotiate a better deal on one of the services you pay for.

Step 4. Remind Yourself Place your goals above your computer, on the mirror in the bathroom or any other place you will see it a number of times each day.

Step 5. Review your progress Thing happen and adjustments need to be made even to the best laid plane. You will want to review your progress on a weekly or monthly basis to make sure you are still heading toward your goal.

Bonus Step. Tell the world Tell anyone and everyone your goal. Shout it out if you have to. The more peopel that know, the more likely you are to stick with it.

Reaching your financial goals is much like finding a specific place hundred miles away. If you start heading in the general direction, there is a chance that you’ll eventually reach where you want to go, but if you have a detailed map of how to get there, you’re much more likely to get there and in a lot less time. The more detailed the map, the better the chance of reaching your destination in the least amount of time. The same is true with a step by step “map” to your financial goals.