Goal Setting Series - Getting Started #1

What comes to mind when you think about goal setting?

If you're anything like me, you're probably thinking about cocktails on the beach or some other idealistic retirement adventure. I feel it it's definitely important to have these types of goals but how do we get there? We need to take steps along the way, we can't just want our future we have to work towards it.

 

"we can't just want our future we have to work towards it"

This article series aims to be a regular process for me essentially journaling what our goals are and how we are moving towards (or away) from them. To do this we will literally take stock of exactly where we currently are where we are heading and if we are making progress or not. Initially I can see this playing out by me answering the following questions:

 

•          What is our very long term goal?
•          What's happening right now?
•          What are we working on?
•          What's our next step?
•          What's on our six month outlook?

 

For our first entry let's move through these in a very high level.

What Is Our Very Long Term Goal?

 

These very much are the long term blue sky thinking type of goals. Not the reason we wake up every day specifically, but instead the vision that appears when our mind wanders. I like many others would love to be in a situation where I really don't have to work in a 9 to 5 job to put food on the table and money in my pocket, I would like to have my house paid off, my future family set up without any debt worries, and be able to dedicate my time to activities that I enjoy doing and that would help me get up in the morning energised and rearing to go. 

What's Happening Right Now?

 

As we speak I have a full time job working as an engineer, my wife has a full time job working as a social worker. We bring in two salaries and currently have no dependents apart from our pet cat. We have recently bought our first home which is our principal place of residence and we are working on paying off our mortgage as quickly as possible. We have a small holding of ETF's in my name that pay us some very nominal tens of dollars in dividends quarterly.

What Are We Working On?

 

One of the next major personal milestones is hopefully having a child or two, and we have also taken an interest in becoming financially self-sufficient through our own personal investments and holdings rather than needing to wait for our old age pension to kick in. This may allow us to consider early retirement, or in the immediate term the potential for either myself or my wife to take some steps back from our full-time employment roles.

 

What's Our Next Step?

 

I'm an engineer and I really enjoy working on and developing spreadsheets both as part of my day job and in my spare time. I've been building our own personal finances into a series of recorded calculations that will hopefully allow us to monitor and track exactly where we're going financially. Our very next step is to do a detailed stocktake of where we are in terms of current assets and liabilities, our ongoing income and expenditure and therefore the amount of money that we have leftover as discretionary spending every month. Once we know that we can then accurately plan and project our next steps.

 

What's On Our Six Month Outlook?

 

In the next six months I would like to have a full grasp of exactly where we sit financially, how much money we have leftover every month to either invest or put to work towards our financial future and I would like to have built up a reasonably detailed road map of what the next five years looks like for us in the most credible scenario.

We really hope this is the beginning of something special, if nothing else this will be a personal journal for us to look back on and reflect, but I am hopeful that we can add more value than that. 

Thanks for your interest
Brian