What are your financial goals for 2022?
Are you like most of us and come up with some New Years resolutions that you never follow through on? Or perhaps you’ve given up on those completely and now don’t set any goals.
The idea of setting goals isn’t new and you will likely know all about them from your work situation. I’m sure you know what your company goals are. And you also know how they track those goals and what they do to meet them.
They set up a plan to achieve the goals and track how things are progressing. Of course most business goals are financial, or at least financially related. Their whole reason for functioning is to make money.
How about using some of their knowledge to set your own financial goals to make you money?
Have Financial Goals
May sound crazy but the best thing to do is to be specific and write down even one goal you have financially. It may be as simple as “My goal is to save $100 each pay period.”
Just having this written down will help you begin to feel like you have something to achieve.
Of course you might have much larger and loftier goals such as “Buy my first house next year” or “Set up my Retirement Fund and have $1 Million in it.”
Which ever it is, that first thing is to get clear on what you want to achieve. Write it down, then work out how you can achieve that goal.
Set Measurable Steps
You likely know that your employer has quarterly targets they want to meet. These feed into the larger financial goal, set for the entire year.
That is a great way for you to break down your goal into measurable steps too.
What would you need to put in place to save that $100 a pay period? Perhaps its about setting up automatic deduction into a different savings account – for example.
Or to buy your first house, what do you need to do? Is it to save a deposit?
Your plan is to understand your finances so that you know how much you can save each week or month, or whatever your pay cycle is, in order to achieve that.
By breaking down your goals into measurable steps you begin to feel like you can achieve the goal, and you have a way of tracking how you are doing.
It Takes Time to Change Habits
Remember that it takes time to change old habits, they don’t just shift overnight. If you haven’t been in the habit of saving, it may take a few weeks or months to get comfortable and do it easily and automatically.
You may have to change some of your other habits, like spending money on clothes, or going out in order to achieve your goal. That is about making the choice. Do you want to continue with your current life style and not get the house of your dreams? Or, do you want to do things differently for 6-12 months in order to have the funds to have your dream?
Think about using an App to track your spending and saving, there are a number out there to help you.
No matter what the financial goal is you have, you can achieve it, with a bit of willingness and understanding.
Simple Steps Can Make a Big Difference
Are you in the best financial situation to start 2022? If not then follow these steps to set your financial goals and put yourself on the path to a wealthier future. All it takes is some simple financial management practices that put you in a place of saving regularly, and investing wisely. No one taught you how to manage your finances in High School.
That doesn’t mean that you can’t set yourself up for a bright future starting in 2022.