It’s commonly accepted that during anybody’s life, there is a time when they started to think about their financial goals, and most of people thought that money is important thing in their lives. Perhaps many people say that having money is not the main purpose of their lives, but for sure we can’t deny that money has significant role in the process to achieve other important goals in our lives.

For example, may be our main purpose is to get happiness by helping each other, having a harmonious family, having many friends, and the other noble purposes. We can do those things in our daily life, either with or without money. But just try to imagine, how you can do it in convenience way if you are still heavily burdened to fulfill daily basic necessity, hardly thinking about how to pay your child’s school, or other urgent needs. On the other side, situation will be different if today you’ve been able to regularly allocate some sufficient amount of money to cover your daily lives, make saving for your future lives, or even if you have passive income which can cover all of your needs. I think your life will be seems easier and comfortable to do other important things, don’t you ?

As different person has different perception about word rich, I try to categorize the people into three types in accordance with their concern to financial freedom ;

First, people who already known what’s their own financial purposes, have enough knowledge to implement personal finance management in their life, and do implement their knowledge in daily life. This kind of people is used to become successful in their financial and social life.

Second, people who don’t care enough about financial freedom. For them, financial freedom is just another slogan, and doesn’t so important as well. They tend to entertain their today’s life with almost of their earnings. This kind of people are usually stuck in their lifestyle and as a consequence they must work hard just to pay their current lifestyle.

Third, people who care with the goals of their financial future, have the desire to achieve the goals, but don’t know how to get started. I present this post for these people.

Well, for those of you who are starting to define your financial goals, below are some tips which might be useful for you:

1. Start your step by making goals that suit to your needs, not your desires

Set goals depend on desire will lead you to unrealistic goals, which have no accurate measurement tools, and make you becoming mad in the process to achieve those goals. One simple example is the goal of your saving amount for your pension stage of life. You can freely set any amount as you want, but if you define it based on estimated monthly expenditure at the time of your pension ages, the goal will be more realistic for you.

2.Set some main priorities quantitatively, starting from the most important and urgent things

Suppose you are a 30 years of age male, with $ 4000 monthly income, have been married, and has one 2 years old child, then you can sort your goals as follows:
- Routine monthly expenditure = $ 2,000
- House and car loan repayments = $ 1,000 monthly
- Next year your child shall enter a pre-school, with an estimated $ 1,000 registration fee
- Set aside an emergency fund, with $ 10,000 savings target in next two years
- Plan your family vacation each year, with $ 1,000 budget
- Estimated monthly expenditure of your pension life time, let say $ 10,000 per month

3. Personal Finance Budgeting: Count the needs of your monthly budget based on those goals, and then compare it with your current monthly income

Refer to the example mentioned above:
- Routine expenditures + loan repayments = $ 3,000
- Using financial calculator or Microsoft Excel, you can calculate the money you need to save starting from this month for having $ 1000 registration fee of your child’s school funding by next year (assuming net return of investment is 7% p.a), which is $ 80.23
- For $ 10,000 savings amount in next two more years, you have to set aside $ 387.13 per month starting from now on
- For family holidays, $ 80.23 per month
- For $ 10,000 estimated monthly expenditure at starting point of your pension age (next 30 years), you must have $ 1,714,286 savings 30 years later. To produce this amount, you must start to save $ 1,397 a month from now on

By adding all monthly expenditure, the amount of your monthly budget will be $ 4,944.59, which is $ 944.59 exceeds $ 4,000 monthly earnings.

4. Based on the results,

since your current monthly income doesn’t sufficient to accommodate such budget, you will have something to do, for example to temporarily eliminate your pension fund’s goal, while looking for solutions to increase your earnings by $ 1,000 (to $ 5,000) in the near future.

You can perform different simulation and make your own goals based on your preferences. Hopefully, by setting financial goals since the beginning, you will be able to well organize your personal finances and give you a motivation to search additional revenue in line with your goals.

I have to emphasize once little more, when you set your goals, please set the goals that you thought realistic enough to achieve based on the needs. By doing that, you will not get any stress in the process of achieving those goals, and personal finances will become an interesting game in your life.

Have a nice try !

Tags: financial freedom, Personal Finance Budgeting, Personal Finance Management

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!