What’s your goal for 2020?

We are about to start a new year 2020, lots of celebrations, fun with family, friends party. Wish you a great year ahead. Many of you, have a habit of writing goals for new year. Some of you have them in your mind, few people write them down and very less people follow up and achieve their goals. Its always good idea to write your goals in paper. Keep your goals visible every day, either home, office, on your laptop wall paper or mobile screen. Keep reading these goals and visualize the right outcome of those goals, eventually you will start accomplishing them.

I have started writing my goals from 2007 onwards, every year I write them in my dairy and read them at least twice in a week. Later I have learnt to segregate these goals into various categories. From 2011 onwards when I write goals, I will label them with categories like Personal, Finance, Family and Social goals. For example, going for gym is my personal goal, saving 2 lakhs in a year is my financial goal, going out for vacation with family is my family goal and donating 25000 to a charity is social goal. I had this habit of reviewing my goals at the end of year, mostly in December 2^nd / 3^rdweek. If I evaluate my goals, my goals accomplishment percentage is only 45-50. It means out of 10 goals I set at the beginning of the year; I achieve only 4/5 goals. Rest of them I use to carry forward for next year. From 2014 onwards I started adding an end date to each goal. This way my goal achievement rate has improved to 6/7 goals per 10 goals.

I wanted to improvise it further from 2017 onwards, then along with adding end date to each goal, I started adding action steps for each goal. For example, for one of my financial goal of saving 2 lakhs in year. End date is 15^th Dec, action steps is to divide this goal into steps,

First step is to prepare monthly budget of Income, Expenses and Savings.

Second step is to save 20% of my savings 15,000/- every month

Third step is to invest additional 20,000 in Aug from the bonus

Fourth step is to calculate the total savings done for the year

This way I started writing action steps for each and every goal, some goals may have 2 steps and others may have 8 action steps. This was fun doing and enjoying my journey towards my goals.

Some of the common goals people write is Health, Travel, Social, Professional and Financial goals. In this write up I would to share about writing your Financial goals for new year. Some of the common financial goals, I have come across with my investors are

1.      Paying of their Debt – Closing their loans. The loans can be Credit card loan, home loan, personal loan, Business or Educational loans. Always prioritize to close your short-term loans which have high interest rate such as credit card loans and personal loans.

2.      Having a monthly budget – Here most of them try to be perfect, which is not possible all the time and they end up stopping this after 2-3 months. Tracking your expenses is not that easy. But, simplify it, keep 15 mins in a week or 5 mins a day to list down your expenses. Spend one Sunday morning (may be one hour) to track all your income, expenses and savings. There are many apps available for this, but be careful when sharing your financial data. Use only trusted apps for your finances.

3.      Financial Education goals – Reading an article, watching a useful video on finance or attending a seminar or webinar to gain some financial knowledge. Even reading a good book on personal finance might help. Keep a dedicated time in a week to read and understand about financial knowledge

You may add your few more financial goals for the year, don’t forget to add action steps for each goal. Hope this write up might help you. Wish you a very Happy new year in advance. Wish you lots and loads of Health, Wealth, Happiness and Wisdom. For any questions or feedback please drop an email to ‘[email protected]’

Happy Reading, Happy Learning

Vikram Sapparad

Wealth Coach