Hello and welcome to Savings Circle where we help millennial professionals feel confident about managing their money. 

I’m your host Vineet Prasad the founder of Savings Academy. On today’s episode we’ll be talking about financial goal setting.

If you’ve ever felt like you’re lost around your finances or are frustrated often times one underlying symptom is that you maybe didn’t have clear goals for what you want around your finances and therefore don’t have a clear pathway to get them get there or even know whether you’re on track. So I really like to start with when I’m working with folks setting clear financial goals with them. I wanted to share with you some best practices and tips for what I’ve seen work. 

Unedited Transcript Continues:

So the first thing is I just wanted to you know ask the
question what are financial goals what does that mean so financial goals I
think can come in kind of two buckets there’s the more quantitative goals like
for example paying down a credit card increasing your credit score paying down
student loans building an emergency fund saving for a home those are probably
the most common ones but they’re also very valid and important qualitative
goals something like knowing where my money goes every month feeling confident
uh that I know what I’m doing with with my finances and both are equally
important we’ll focus a bit more on the quantitative today but when you do you
know write out your goals I’d say getting all of those out is is important so
the first tip I have for setting successful financial goals is to think big um
so when you go through kind of the brainstorming exercise of what are my
financial goals I would really try to take a step back and ask yourself this
question um got this from someone named George Kinder who uh really focuses
around financial life

planning uh around what would you do if money was not um an
obstacle in your life if you could do anything if you had you know practically
unlimited amounts of money what kind of lifestyle would you live um and then
you can work backwards to see okay what are some of those components if you say
for example would want to live in a certain area okay well then what’s you know
you can take that goal I want to live in the mountains in Colorado okay
therefore I now know you can break that down to smaller pieces I need to save
up for a down payment maybe before that I’d want to pay off

you know this my student loans etc. but I’d start thinking
really big so that you can get excited about your goals each individual piece
here might not sound super exciting paying off a loan building a certain amount
of savings but if you have a big vision you’re working towards that can be
great the other tip I have is to get aligned if you’re doing this with a
partner if you co-manage finances in any way with a partner I would highly
recommend doing

it together I’ve definitely seen a number of times where
when we go through goal-setting exercises partners have totally different goals
or even sometimes didn’t realize that another partner had a goal that was
really important to them so I’d say definitely do this together if you’re
managing your finances with someone else if you’re doing it alone just make
sure you’re really thoughtful about what you actually want the next tip I have
is to once you get a list of goals and I’d really recommend doing a
brainstorming exercise get as many as you can out there then among the
quantitative

goals try to quantify and prioritize them so what I mean
there is figure out for those goals around say debt payoff savings um try to
come up with a target for yourself for where you want to be and understand
where you are today and write that down you can write that down you know if you
don’t like spreadsheets you can just do a word document or even write it down I
really like doing that in a spreadsheet I think it’s a really good format for
financial goal setting and then the next thing I would do once you’ve
quantified these goals prioritize them this is really important because a lot
of folks I work with have lots of financial goals you know they want to save
for a trip they want to pay off you know their loans they want to save for a
down

payment they want to uh is a number of things um I’ve had
folks where I work with we come up with seven or eight important financial
goals and the thing is those can get very overwhelming those kind of flow
through in your head and you can keep thinking about all the various goals you
have so I highly recommend actually ranking them like what’s number one two
three four in terms of priority and then uh from there I’d say try to focus on
one or two goals at a time maximum that you’re building towards so you can make
good progress towards those goals so pick the number one and two priorities in
your in your rankings and really focus on those and the last piece that is the
most important once you’ve uh brainstormed you know what’s

important to you and around your finances you’re aligned
with your partner you’ve quantified and prioritized those goals the last one is
to make sure

you revisit those goals I really recommend as you may have
seen in some of my other um shows having a cadence where you review your
finances you go back and see kind of where your finances are versus where you
wanted them to be a monthly cadence is really good for that so going and  getting back on your goals monthly and seeing
hey do these look about right most months you may say okay you know these still
look right I don’t need to re-prioritize them some months you might change
things up and always kind of understanding okay where is your progress towards
these goals each month so those are my main tips I have for today around
financial goal setting try to make things as clear as possible for yourself so
you can understand where you are where you want to be and how things are going
it really can make you feel more relaxed around the really stressful issues
that surround money that’s all for today thank you for checking out today’s
episode and for more personal finance tips you can always

check out my website savingsacademy.com if you found today’s
episode useful I would greatly appreciate you leaving me a rating a review so
more people can learn about the show until next time keep saving my friends
keep saving