Happy 2020. How’s your 2020 vision? As we ring in a fresh new year and a whole new decade, in fact, it’s important to take a step back to assess and reflect upon your progress during the past year. Try this from a personal and financial perspective. To create a new plan for a new year, you must first assess where you are.
Personal Goals
Are you excited to be embarking on a brand, new year? How was your 2019? Are you pleased with your results? To assess how you did in 2019, ask yourself a few of these questions.
What events, choices, changes, and decisions went well in 2019?
What were my very best choices in 2019?
What events, choices, changes, and decisions did not meet my expectations in 2019?
What goals did I achieve?
Where did my results fall short? Can I recognize any patterns?
What new habit helped me in ways I didn’t expect?
Did I form any poor habits in 2019 that I’d like to change in 2020?
In what ways did I spend, save, and earn money wisely?
What was my greatest success and biggest disappointment of 2019?
These are great questions to ask yourself as you begin to think about your new set of best practices for this new year. Who knows? You might even dream up some great new habits that will take you through this entire decade! First, though, you need to be clear about past your results and performance, understand new and current circumstances, and be ready and excited to take control of your FUTURE. Once you understand the past, are clear about your present, and positive about moving forward, it’s time to set your 3 Big Goals for 2020. JUST THREE.
Top Three Categories for Big Personal Goals
The top personal goals people set at the start of a new year typically fall into three big categories. We suggest that you begin your 2020 plan by creating and committing to one big goal in each category, hence our suggestion to create 3 big goals.
The first category is SELF. This includes goals around health, sleep, losing weight, getting more exercise, quitting a bad habit, and learning something new or reading more. These resolutions are often the most popular in January and are often become invisible shortly thereafter. Old habits are hard to break and new habits are equally hard to form.
The second category is goals around FAMILY. These goals center around spending more time with family and friends, aligning your priorities to your time choices, more travel, cooking meals together, and living life to the fullest. These goals are usually longer term and as a result get a lot of discussion and not much action. It’s easy for life to eclipse goals in this category unless and until you make these goals into routines and everyone commits to them. How many books did you mean to read in 2019?
The third category is all about MONEY, saving money, saving up for special events or activities, investing wisely, being more organized and accurate in investments, paying more attention to personal finances and of course, setting and sticking to a monthly budget. Goals in this category are often the most concrete and of course the easiest to see. If you’re not organized, you could miss a lot of savings. Conversely, if you do become more organized, you might discover a discount plan you’d have missed.
Goals Stand Alone and Work Together
As you set your big goals for 2020, thing about how all three of your goals will work together.
While each of these categories is separate, a goal in any of these three categories, self, family, and finances, falls into all three life categories. For example, career and job changes are often motivated by self (perhaps you’re not happy in your present job), family (perhaps you want to change jobs to have a shorter commute and get home to your family earlier each day) and finances (perhaps you want to earn more money). The financial benefits of changing jobs is often a motivator that helps both self and family; you might be able to travel more, you might be challenged in new ways, or taking a new job might help to reduce your debt. Each of these results will have an impact on you, your family, and your financial situation. As you can see from this scenario, your big goals will often overlap and benefit the various aspects of your life. As you craft your 2020 goals, consider how your three separate goals, one for self, another for family, and finally, a big financial goal will both stand alone and work together to help you have a wonderful and productive 2020.
Financial Goal Setting
As January unfolds, your 2019 end-of-year spending actions, personal financial reflections, and tax preparation activities can serve as helpful reminders of the value of setting smart financial goals for the new year. Of course, as the incoming bills from holiday shopping make their way to your inbox and mailbox, they can provide a different sort of reality check and evidence that you want to approach 2020 with different and better financial goals.
While your 2019 financial performance is still fresh in your mind, now is an excellent time to plan to take a few crucial first-steps to help make 2020 an even better year. Because FUTURES: Financially Literate Kids for a Financially Literate Society™ focuses on Personal Finance, Economics, Entrepreneurship, and of course, Investing, it is a terrific (and FREE!) resource to keep at your fingertips as you begin to map out your 2020 financial plan. To help you get started, the FUTURES team has posed some questions and conducted some research to help you get started. Just download the program, today!
Look Back to Look Ahead
As you start to plan, use a rear-view mirror and look at the concrete results of your 2019 financial choices. Ask yourself:
Did I create a 2019 budget?
If so, did I stick to it all year?
If not, how long was I able to maintain this smart habit?
Did I pay your bills on time?
Did I worry a lot about money?
Was I able to save any money in 2019?
Was I able to save the amount you had planned to save?
Did I invest your money wisely?
How did my investments and other financial decisions turn out?
What kinds of financial choices didn’t work?
How could my 2019 results help me to create even better and smarter financial goals for 2020?
Can I identify any financial habits I’d like to change?
Biggest Financial Priorities
To assess and design the right financial goals for you and your family, you must first define your biggest financial priorities for the year and clearly assess the financial demands of these priorities.
Do you want to save up for one big purchase like a car?
Are any of your children getting close to starting college?
Are you hoping to be able to save up enough to send your kids to a local camp this summer?
Are you planning a big change like moving at any point in this year?
Are you in school and planning to graduate during this year?
What about your job or work? What changes might be coming on that horizon?
By answering these big change questions, you can begin to identify your biggest financial priorities for 2020. Beyond these situational financial priorities, you’ll also have ongoing financial priorities. The rent needs to get paid on time, medical bills come in, surprises happen, and so forth. Many people are facing similar financial challenges. Here are some of the top financial goals that people are setting for 2020:
Save more money.
Get out of debt.
Create an emergency find for surprises.
Improve credit scores.
Earn more money.
Get smarter about finances to make better decisions.
Use technology more to save time and be more thorough.
Build a budget and stick to it.
Be more disciplined with spending.
SMART Goals Work!
Each of these goals is actually not even a goal! In fact, as these goals are described here by people, they are really just hopeful wishes. To be an achievable goal, a goal must be SMART, Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Timely. To create a goal from “save more money” that meets the five parameters of a real goal, you must define it.
Falling Short is Better Than Nothing
Goals are best achieved one step at a time. It can be tough to hit all your big goals for a year, even when your goals are smart and you break them down into achievable segments and mini-goals. Some might say it’s nearly impossible. As a result of this all or nothing thinking, some people opt not to even try setting goals.
Falling short of a goal is not a good reason to avoid setting goals. What might happen if in the example above, you fell short of saving $3600 and only achieved 80% of your goal? Why, you would still have saved $3000! So, falling short shouldn’t stop you from setting goals. So long as you learn and correct your course along the way, you’re likely to make progress.
Goal setting in 2020 can help you shape a framework for what you want to experience and achieve in 2020. Big goals can help you envision your bigger FUTURE! By setting just three big goals and working incrementally to reach them, big goals can make a positive difference and help you to understand the full scope of work and commitment needed to create your bigger FUTURE. Remember to adjust and set new interim mini-goals that may be more realistic. Big goals for the year are important metrics and guides as you move from month to month.
Not all big goals will require a full year to accomplish. Some big goals may be short-term and achievable in just a couple months. Other big goals, like saving money to put your fourth grader through college, will likely take years to accomplish. It’s important to not become discouraged if you’re not quite meeting your big goals right away. Take a step back, reassess, and then try a new approach. It takes time, energy, smart habits, commitment, and tenacity to meet big goals. By choosing the 3 big goals that are right for you, you’ll be on your way to shaping a brighter, bigger FUTURE for your family, your class, and yourself.
Whatever your big goals may be for 2020, you’ll benefit from understanding more about Personal Finance, Economics, Entrepreneurship, and Investing so begin by investing a bit of time to discover what you can learn from FUTURES: Financially Literate Kids for a Financially Literate Society™. The price is free and the learning is priceless!
Join us in a few days for our next blog post called 365 Slices that focuses on how to align your biggest life priorities to the littlest actions you take every single day. Until then, Become a Big 3 Goalie!