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Financial Goals
| Goal setting is something that you should do with your family or the people you live with. You may also want to involve your older children, especially if achieving certain goals will require changes or sacrifices on their part.
Make sure that your goals are realistic:
| - The more you depend on luck to achieve a goal, the more that goal is probably unrealistic. If you set unrealistic goals for yourself, you may get discouraged and give up on them.
| - It is better to set small, achievable goals and once you accomplish them, establish a new set of achievable goals to work toward.
| Once you have decided on your goals, its time to create a written plan to carry out each of them. To do this, record each goal on your Financial Goals Action Plan Worksheet, under the appropriate heading: Short-term goal, Mid-term goal, or Long-term goal.
| Click here for your Financial Goals Action Plan Worksheet
| For each goal that you list:
1) Write down how much money you need to achieve it-the goal's total cost, or your best guess of what that is, and the number of months you believe it will take for you to reach the goal.
2) Next, divide the total cost of the goal by the number of months you have to achieve it. The dollar amount you end up with is the amount of money you need to save toward that goal each month in order to reach it within the time frame you have set for yourself.
3) Write down what you will do in order to come up with that amount of money every month. For example, you may decide to get a second job, your spouse may need to begin working outside the home, or you may resolve to reduce your monthly spending by a certain amount.
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