Money Listens

Do you have some big ideas about what to do with your money? Maybe you have a list of goals that looks something like this:

• Get a handle on my finances.
• Save enough to retire comfortably.
• Start a Roth IRA.
• Save enough to pay cash for Christmas presents.

Most of these aren’t goals at all, but dreams. Goals have to be specific and have a time frame. You have to know what you’re going to do and how long it will take. Most of these are more than a mouthful. The trick is to break down a goal into bite-size pieces.

The Baby Steps are a series of goals. Step One is $1,000 in an emergency fund. Simple, right? But hold on a minute. How long will it take to get there? A day, A week, A few months? Where should the emergency fund be? A mayonnaise jar, under the mattress, or in one of those new online savings accounts? Begin where ever you are in the Baby Steps and set a few small goals for that step that you can accomplish in less than 13 weeks. If you are on Step One you might have a bite-size goal of opening a new online savings account. Set whatever time frame you think is realistic. “I will spend 10 minutes a day for 3 days researching various accounts. I will discuss this with my spouse and open the account by next week.”

If you are on Step Two: Pay Off Debt, you could set a goal of putting something for sale onto craigslist.com each week for 13 weeks and using the proceeds to pay off debt.

You can set a goal of spending so many minutes a week on reading a book about finances. If you don’t have much extra time, set goals that don’t take much time. “My eating out budget will be reduced to $fill-in-the-blank$. I will take my lunch to work instead of eating out 3 times each week.” Be realistic. Keep it simple and specific.

Get a spiral notebook and write down your goals, and write down your progress. Keep a running journal of what you discover about savings accounts or cheap meals or what a Foosball table goes for on Ebay.

Celebrate along the way. You can feel good about yourself because you’re really getting a handle on your finances. And that’s always been one of your dreams.

This entry (Permalink) was posted on Wednesday, March 5th, 2008 at 3:17 pm and is filed under Goals and Dreams. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response , or trackback from your own site.