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Posts Tagged ‘dollar amounts’

Now that you know where you stand financially, you must figure out where you want to go. Setting specific financial objectives and putting them in writing—listing dollar amounts and noting exactly when you will need the money—will motivate you to achieve your goals. So many people never take the time to figure out what they want because they have convinced themselves that they will never reach their targets. However, if you don’t define your goals, you won’t accomplish them.This section will give you several easy-to-fill-out worksheets so you will be able to determine your highest financial priorities and how you can achieve them.

You can’t reach all of your goals overnight, but knowing what they are, and which ones take precedence, will help you fulfill your goals faster than if you never took the time to do this exercise. Because setting goals is really another way of defining priorities, the process helps you make sure that your limited resources and income are used most effectively to attain your highest priorities. By crystalizing your aspirations, you take charge of your life so that you control your money for the purposes you find most important.

Don’t think that goal setting is too hard  you’ve been doing it for most of your life. When you last started a diet, you set a specific goal for how many pounds you would trim. When you were on the track team in high school, you set a goal to
achieve a particular time for your event—a four-minute mile, for instance. As you went through college, you set a goal of a certain grade-point average or maybe a goal of doing well enough to enter a certain graduate school. All you are doing now is applying the same discipline to your personal finances.