Do you have a plan? Do you have a financial plan? Do you have financial goals? Do you have any goals? 🙂
What do you want to be worth when you’re 30 years old, 40 years old, 50 years old, etc.?
What do you want to be doing with the rest of your life or at different stages of your life and how are you going to do that?
Do you want to be like Timothy Ferriss of “The 4-Hour Workweek”, where you take mini-retirements. Sounds good to me. I suppose a bit tough to do for a lot of folks but he is definitely on the right track.
I highly recommend you read his book The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich
It’s important to ask these questions and try to answer them in some form, because not only are you looking into the future to try and sculpt or shape it, but it also creates a bit more stability in your mind as well as open the possibilities you might not have thought about.
I know some folks don’t like to perform repetitive tasks in life because they always want to do something different so they don’t get bored with life or complacent. However, if you’re married or have a family where other people financially count on you, then you might want to plan some of your financial future by setting goals.
We’ll take the first action that I talk about on this blog, open an online savings account. Sounds simple for some, on the other hand it might be difficult for others.
After you’ve accomplished that goal, you might set other goals for the account. Let’s say you’ve decided to save enough for that proverbial 3-6 months of emergency funds and that would make you feel good and secure about any hardships that come about during everyday life.
Well, write down the target amount. Let’s say you would like to save $5,000.00 before you stop automatic deposits to that account. So do some simple math and let’s say you deposit $100.00 a month through automatic deposits for four years.
You’d be contributing $1,200.00 a year for four years and you’d have $4,800.00 in your online savings account. Plunk $200.00 more in there for the final month or $100.00 for an additional two months and that would give you your $5,000.00, 3-6 month emergency funds that would then grow at around 5% which would give you $250.00 a year that your money would make for you.
Now, I know that sounds wonderful and that sometimes emergencies happen right when you’re in the middle of your savings plan or for some folks all the time, but this is something that you forge ahead with until you hit that magical number that you’ve set for yourself.
I would start thinking about your tax refund, if you usually get one, and NOT planning on using it at all except for your online savings account or funding your Roth IRA account.
Stop thinking about your tax refund as if it’s some kind of gift or Christmas present from the government. It’s you’re hard earned money that you lent the government instead of making money on it yourself. Just say NO to that type of thinking!! 🙂
“A journey of a thousand leagues begins with a single step” – Confucius