Was financial organization part of your 2017 New Years Resolutions?

I have a question for you. Are You Making Progress Toward Your Financial Goals?

Back in January, I recorded a video that we posted here on our blog, wishing everybody a Happy New Year, but more importantly, in that video, I also challenged everybody to really try to make 2017 one of your best years ever. So, the question is, are you making progress towards some of your goals, some of your New Year’s resolutions?

This morning, I was actually watching a video online from somebody that I follow by the name of Gary Vaynerchuk. Some of you may even know of him. He actually grew an online wine business up to $60 million a year. Somebody asked him in an interview, what he thought about New Year’s resolutions, and he said, “I think New Year’s resolutions are great, if it’s January 1st. If it’s December 23rd, I think December 23rd resolutions are great. If it’s March 15th, I think March 15th resolutions are great”.

Sometimes I think we get too hung up on the calendar year and we think that we have to wait until January 1st to start working towards something new. Well, what I was mentioning in the blog that I put out back in January, talking about goal setting was, from time to time we sometimes have a tendency to get off track with our goals, and that’s just human nature. We may set out a goal that we want to be healthier, or we want to lose a little bit of weight, exercise more, we want to spend more time with our family, work on our relationships, work on our job, and even work towards our financial goals, obviously, and that’s what we talk about here a lot of times, is working towards some of those goals, and then life gets in the way. We seem to get busy. We’ve got functions we have to do with our family, birthday parties, kids events, and some of those goals tend to go by the wayside. So, I think it’s especially important to continuously come back to these goals and evaluate where we are versus the goals that we set. Are we making progress to them, and know that it’s human nature to sometimes fall off track.

One of the things that I like to use as a tool for goal setting is, and some of you may have heard of this, called SMART Goals.  When you make a goal, you follow this acronym. SMART – Specific, Measurable, Actionable or Attainable, Realistic, and Time-sensitive. So if you make a goal, it has to meet all of those criteria. So you say, “Hey, I want to exercise more often”. That doesn’t really fit that SMART criteria, because that’s very vague, doesn’t meet any of those standards. But to make that a SMART goal, it would be something very specific like “I want to exercise at least three days a week. I’m going to exercise Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays”. I’m going to make that measurable.  If I said I’m going to exercise every day for two and a half hours every day, that probably isn’t very realistic. That’s probably something that I’m going to fall a little bit short of. And it has to be time-sensitive as well, so you’re going to do this for a specific period of time to accomplish that goal.

When it comes to your financial goals as well, you want to look at them in the same kind of context. If you make a financial goal, make sure it adheres to that SMART context so you can track whether or not you’re on track. So, if you’ve fallen a little bit off track, that’s okay, but it’s time to get back on track.

One of the tools that we have available on our free resources section on our blog at Money Evolution, is a mini workshop. It’s called The Race To Retirement Mini Workshop. It’s broken down into three parts. I think each section is maybe about 10 or 15 minutes long. There’s some worksheets that go along with that, and it walks you through a step by step process to kind of evaluate where you are. There are some budgeting tools that are part of that, so you can maybe keep track of where some of your money is going. I think that’s one of the most critical factors in your long term financial success, knowing where that money is going. We’re also going to look into the future, especially if you’re getting close to retirement, at what are some of the things that you want to accomplish for retirement, and then we start to look at ways that we can help you kind of bridge the gap that you may have between where you are right now on your financial goals versus where you want to be. So again, that’s something totally free to attend. It’s up on our resources section on our blog at Money Evolution.

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