It’s football season. Matches are won if you play hard and score goals. Likewise, in any area of your life, goals are important – especially in getting rich. Like you can’t win a football match if you don’t score goals, you can’t win in the game of personal wealth creation, if you don’t set financial goals – i.e, reasonable but challenging goals.
CREATE CHALLENGING GOALS
There’s nothing better than challenging yourself. It motivates you. It sets you up on the path of achieving more. Winning gives you thrill, a joy. When you win in your finances, you set yourself up for more financial victories. So when you set challenging financial goals, you will have won half the battle of creating huge wealth for yourself.
Upfront: You have to write down your goals. You could have big goals, small goals, short-term or long-term goals. In financial terms, getting the goal on record is a huge accomplishment. Your goals could be anything right from retirement, to an Ivy League education for your kids, to a home, a car or an iPhoneX.
DRAW UP A CLEAR ROAD MAP
When you were young, you remember how you scrimped and saved just to be able to buy yourself a first phone. When you plan for anything, save some money ahead of time. Set aside those savings for just your goals.
Create a plan, figure out how to accomplish it. Stay with it. If in the beginning it seems unsurmountable, you have to keep going. Try starting small. Raise the bar as much as you can to reach your financial goals.
Example: If you can save Rs 15000 a month easily, up the stakes to Rs 20,000 a month. Take that challenge and see if you can work up your appetite for bigger financial success. Of course, you will have to tighten some belts elsewhere, but if it gives you success in achieving your goals, it will be your motivating factor.
Sit down and plan a budget for yourself. It’s easy to set yourself up on a short-term goal. That’s because goals give you a target that you have to achieve. So if you want to save Rs six lakh for a down payment on a house you want in two years, you know you have to save Rs 25,000 a month.
As you get close to your goal, you could recalculate your financial goals. You will know whether you are on track in meeting your goals or not. If you have fallen behind, you will need to up your financial game if you need to get behind the goal post.
CONSTANTLY CHECK YOUR GOAL POST
As you get closer to retirement you should recalculate yearly whether you are on track to meet your goals or not. If you aren’t, you’ll need to put away more money monthly to get yourself there. You can re-look at your investment vehicles to bring in more income, or change your strategy to achieve your goals faster.
Keep a journal of all the goals that you have. This will help you know where you are standing, and create more new goals if needed. You, of course, don’t need to change your long-term financial goals. But for most people, there is always new short-term goals.
The key to achieving goals is to keep going as much as possible, and hopefully the above information has helped you do just that. Refer to the material often, but remember, matches are won if you play hard.
We will give you more on goal-setting in future articles, till then Happy Football.
