Set Your Financial and Lifestyle Goals

The start of a new year is the perfect time to obtain professional financial advice and in doing so help secure your future for years to come.

Life Goals

Part of the planning process should be to articulate and write down your financial and life goals. Doing this can have an impact on actually achieving them by helping you to maintain focus in the face of distractions, setbacks and challenges.

Reach Milestones

Developing effective money habits, having a lifestyle you can afford and thinking carefully about your family priorities will help you identify and reach these goals or milestones – the key to having money serve you well over your whole lifetime.

Clear Objectives

It is often said that saving and investing is nothing more than deferred consumption. Therefore, you need to be crystal clear about why you are doing what you’re doing. This could be planning for your children’s education, your retirement, a dream holiday or a property purchase.

Realistic

It’s important to set goals that you can achieve. While I might be a good thing to keep your financial goals a bit aggressive, being overly unrealistic can definitely impact on your chances of achieving them. A realistic goal is one that you can reach given your current mindset, motivation level, time frame, skills and abilities. Realistic goals help you to identify what you want but also what you can achieve.

Divide Goals

Next you need to save and invest to achieve your goals. The approach is not the same for all financial goals, therefore you need to divide them by time horizon. As a general rule, any financial goal within five years is considered short-term. Medium-term goals are typically based on a five-year to ten-year time horizon, and over ten years, these goals are classed as long-term. The division of goals by time horizon will help to form an appropriate savings and investment strategy to help you achieve them.

Take Control

Developing a comprehensive financial plan allows us to take control of our money, assess our current financial situation, set goals and prepare a strategy to help achieve those goals. By better understanding your finances, setting goals and creating a strategy, you will live more comfortably and with greater confidence.

Life Changes

There is little point in setting goals and never returning to them. You should expect to make iterations as life changes. Set a formal yearly review at the very least to check you are on track to meeting your goals. Monitoring financial performance in this way creates more certainty and confidence in making both short and long-term decisions.

Ready to Start?

If you would like to start investing in your future, get in touch for a chat about how I could help you along the way. Either call me on 07774 264356 or email nkidby@chilternconsultancyltd.com