Table of Contents
Chapter 1: How to Determine Your Financial Goals
Chapter 2: Setting Priorities to Reach Your Financial Goals
Chapter 3: Short Term Goals vs. Long Term Goals
Chapter 4: Focus on Feasible Financial Planning Goals
Chapter 5: Review Your Financial Goals Periodically
Chapter 6: Tracking Your Financial Planning Progress
There are no constants in life. Your tastes, perspectives, beliefs and attitudes change as years go by. Your financial goals, both short term and long term, move in line with these changes in your life and personality. This is why a periodic review of your goals is critical to make sure that you work towards goals that continue to be relevant to you.
For example, buying a home in a suburb with a swimming pool and huge backyard may have been your goal when your career commenced. As your family expands, you may now prefer a home in a well populated area next door to your child’s school. A swimming pool or backyard is no longer as important as accessibility to schools. As the goal changes so will the savings you have deemed necessary for it.
Being Flexible is the Key
It is important to be flexible within reasonable limits when you are developing and reviewing your goals. Use your judgment to see if the new goal is still in line with your long term objectives in life. At times, it will become necessary to discard a goal in favor of another more critical one.
You should be flexible enough to do this, provided a rational review shows that the new goal is more important to you and your family. Again, remember to use the two rules to evaluate the new goal and weigh it against the existing one.
For example, your son is a promising artist and he wants to make a career in this field rather than go to Harvard business school as you had planned. In this case, you need to decide if your goal of creating a fund for the business school can be replaced with creating a fund to finance his own art exhibition.
A periodic review ensures that the goals that you are working towards still apply to your situation. This helps you stay on course so that achieving the goal becomes easier.
Next Chapter: Tracking Your Financial Planning Progress
