New Years Money Goals

It's that time of year again to start thinking about your goals and resolutions for the new year. Besides the usual goals of losing weight, exercising more, being a better person in all regards, and whatever else you set out to achieve, many people's goals tie into that all important means of exchange AKA money. The start of a new year is a great time to set your financial goals and set up a realistic saving strategy.

I write a lot about setting financial goals, Paying Yourself First and saving up for a rainy day because those are three things that I believe in strongly. Having an idea of those goals that you wish to achieve in a financial sense is the first step in actually achieving them.  When it comes to money, what better time to focus on your financial goals then at the beginning of the new year?

Setting your money goals can actually be a bit of fun and something that can help you determine the course of your upcoming year when it comes to finances. It's a chance to start fresh, reevaluate your priorities and perhaps even dreaming a bit. For example, you can dream about things that you'd like to achieve in both the near in the distant future, whether you dream of purchasing your first house or perhaps a weekend or vacation house, launching a new business, paying off your mortgage, or finally buying those sports cars, boats or luxury watches that you've always coveted. 

Maybe you've always wanted to travel the world and haven't been able to for lack of money. Maybe you have plenty of money but you've never been able to find the time to do the things you really want to do.

Whatever the case may be for you, it's exciting to think beyond your day-to-day existence and to think about some of your longer range goals.

If you're anything like me, you have started many a year with a set number of resolutions or goals, only to have them slowly disappear in the ensuing weeks and months. By the time March rolls around, I have thought to myself many of time "Who really gives a s*** about those goals that I made idealistically in late December?"

This may sound, as my daughter would say, Basic, but setting your goals down in a list on paper or in pixels on a screen, as I do, will help you think about them concretely, and will provide the framework for your plan of action as well as a source of motivation if you have people who read your goals and can call you on them later, whether in real life or just over social media.

Write down your main short-term goals. 

For these goals, you should be thinking in a one-year time frame. I do this year after year, and for the most part, have been able to achieve them. These are things like saving a certain amount of funds into your retirement accounts, sending a specific amount to your children's college accounts, or perhaps hitting some other benchmark in terms of money that you earn, save, or otherwise invest.

For those of us who strive to make money in the electronic realm of blogs, eBooks, or e-commerce sites, this can be a tangible number that you strive to hit throughout the year and can steadily gauge your progress on week by week and month by month. 

For example, I have resolved to send a total of $5,000 to my children's 529 accounts throughout the year, which I have been able to achieve by setting up automatic withdrawals of $400 on the first of every month and also adding an additional $200 to their accounts at some point during the year. It is a S.M.A.R.T. goal as they say, being specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely. 

Likewise, I aim to send the same amount to my own and my wife's IRA accounts during the year and can easily report at the end of the year if I have attained that number or not. even though I plan to do it anyway, I always set it up as a short-term goal and do whatever I can to achieve it throughout the year.

You should write down one primary medium-term goal that you have. 

This is something that you should be thinking about in a three to five-year time frame. Perhaps it is the down payment on a house or paying off the house that you have lived in for many years, as my own family has. It may be a major family vacation to Europe, Disney World or wherever else it is that you want to go. Whatever your primary medium-term goal is, you should make it realistic. Five years can go by pretty quickly if you keep going through your normal routine as I have in the eat, sleep, work, repeat cycle that I've been slogging through.

Don't get me wrong; there have been many highlights in my life and my family's lives over the past five years, just us there have been numerous low lights. There's some things I would have done differently if given the chance, and there's many others that I would have done exactly the same if I had the chance again. But as you and I know, the chances to redo what we have done over the past five years will never really come back to us again. 

However, as you read this, the next five years are ahead of you and me. We do not know what they will bring to the world at large, our own country, our states, the cities and towns that we live in, at our places of work, at our children's schools, and in our neighborhoods, but we can certainly resolve to achieve one thing that we set our mind on if we strive for it on an ongoing basis, not letting it fall by the wayside as our resolutions often do in the early weeks and months of the year.

My own medium-term goal is one that sounds simple too many folks but really isn't. I want to start a profitable e-commerce business. I know that I could start an e-commerce business by investing enough money in web hosting, various sites to fulfill orders, and money to advertise it. Given a few thousand dollars to spend, anybody could launch an e-commerce business. 

But launching a profitable one is a different story altogether. I don't see myself starting a business in the brick-and-mortar world, which is the world that I work in on a daily basis in my role as an economic development professional. But I do want to have my own store in the virtual world, offering items for sale that have some measure of interest for me and will for others, as well as a few quirky things here and there and various sales pitches. 

I know that I'll be stressed out about the business. There's no doubt about that. but I will continue to work on it until it shows a profit, and I would really like that to come before three or five more years pass by us.  

I will be past the age to achieve FIRE status, but I still want to become financially independent and retired from office-bound, highly politicized bureaucratic work that I do know, answering to someone with far less knowledge about nearly everything than what I possess.  

You should have some long-term goals as well. 

This is time to think about ten years or longer from now. For many people, this could be something like saving for young children's college education, or becoming financially independent and retiring early. It could be paying off your house and purchasing a second home in a warmer climate if you live in the Midwest like I do, or it could be purchasing a luxury boat to keep at the vacation house that you already have. 

If you're a baller, perhaps your years and longer goal will be to be able to acquire a private jet. I do not know what your long-term goal is, but I know that you have one and I know exactly what mine is.

Ten years from now, I want to be completely done with working in an office environment where I have a**hole boss, and a**hole bosses for my boss, and elected and appointed officials that are constantly telling me what I should be doing. I want to be done having night meetings, I want to be be done having long, boring, pointless meetings during the day. I want to be done with complaints from residents of the town that I work for, and I want to be done wearing business casual clothes.

What I'm not saying is that I want to be done working for good; it's just that I want to be in the position to do the kind of work that I feel is fulfilling and that makes me want to wake up in the morning and do it. Things like speaking, writing, or assisting others achieve success in business or whatever endeavors that they pursue. I may be assisting one of my children with their business, or I might be traveling the world at that time extolling financial and other tidbits of wisdom that I have acquired throughout my years. 

I don't know what the future holds and neither do you. What I do know is that ten years from now I want things to be better for myself, my wife and my children. I want them to be in a position where they can succeed greatly.  My son will be thirty years old at the time and my daughter will be twenty-five years old ten years from now in late 2028. Kind of a scary thought actually.

So What Will It Cost?

That is the million dollar question, as they say.

In fact, it may even be a multi-million dollar question depending on what your goals are.  I know many people's whose goals would take two, three or even five million big ones to achieve.  Me, not so much.

When it comes to my financial goals in the coming year, they are relatively simple.

I intend to invest $5,000 more towards my daughter's college savings, although I intend to shift it into an account in my name in the odd case that the hundred-plus grand that I have already saved for her is sufficient to get her through her undergraduate years. Of course, I realize that it will cost more than that, but I do not intend to pay for all of her expenses with 529 accounts.  To get the American Opportunity tax credit, you must pay at least $4,000 out of pocket.  In her case, I expect that we will pay twice that or more out of pocket based upon the schools that she is interested in attending.

Please don't judge me!

I know that it is not financially prudent to shell out a hundred and twenty grand or even more for your child's higher education.  But these days, that piece of paper that says that you completed undergrad is oftentimes the first step toward middle class status or above.  I know that does not hold true in all cases, but I want to do whatever it is that I can to help both of my children attain that valuable piece of paper that sets such a stark contrast between those that have one and those that do not.

In all likelihood, they will end up with multiple pieces of paper like my brother, sister and I did.

I hold pieces of paper from two Big Ten schools.

I also intend to send at least five grand to my own and my wife's Roth IRA accounts.  By sending $500 to my wife's every month, I should be able to exceed that amount by one thousand.  I Pay Myself First various amounts with every paycheck twenty-six times per year.  Assuming that I send at least $200 to my IRA every other week throughout the year, I should be able to exceed $5,200 throughout the year.

The above goals are contingent upon my continued gainful employment.