Goal Setting

Goal setting

Goal setting is a powerful process for thinking about your ideal future, and for motivating yourself to turn your vision of this future into reality. What are your goals for life? For the future? What are the burning ambitions or bucket list items that you just can’t stop thinking about? Have you thought about how you will get there?

These are some of the first and most important questions that we ask each client when we start to work together, and creating a pathway towards them underpins everything we do. So, we encourage you to sit down, pour a wine, and dream big.

What are the most common goals we hear?

• To buy a house
• To help pay for my childrens’ education
• To stop working and do something I love
• To experience the excitement of investing
• To start a new business
• To create a property portfolio
• To go on a dream holiday or once-in-a-lifetime trip
• To be better off than my friends or family
• To pay for personal self-improvement (e.g. go back to school, learn a skill)
• To relocate in retirement
• To care for my aging parents
• To give to charity or other causes I care about
• To feel secure about my finances in retirement
• To feel secure about my finances now
• To pay for future medical expenses
• To not be a financial burden to my family as I grow older
• To manage my debt
• To leave an inheritance to my loved ones
• To retire early…

How do I do it?

Once you’ve thought about what you want to do, here are some steps you can follow to turn them into effective goals:

1. Set Specific Goals: Be clear about what you want to achieve, why it is important, and how you plan to do it. Instead of having a vague goal like “I want to be successful,” specify what success means to you, such as “I want to become a department manager within the next two years.”
   
2. Make Goals Measurable: Include precise amounts, dates, and other details in your goals so you can measure your degree of success. If your goal is simply defined as “Reduce expenses,” it’s not clear when you’ve achieved it. If it’s a more defined goal like “Reduce expenses by 10% in the next six months,” you can clearly tell when you’ve reached your goal.
   
3. Ensure Goals are Achievable: Goals should be challenging but not so far out of reach that they seem impossible. You might want to break down a larger goal into smaller, more attainable goals.
   
4. Make Sure Goals are Relevant: Your goals should be aligned with the direction you want your life or career to take. If you’re not passionate about a goal, it may not be worth pursuing.
   
5. Set Time-Bound Goals: Goals should have a timeline, which creates a sense of urgency and serves as a deadline.

Finally, you could think about prioritising these goals. If you had to choose one as the most important, which would it be? Maybe one is a must-do for practical reasons but another is equally important to feed your soul. These are important things to think about and discuss with your financial adviser when it comes to talking about your future.