Ep 146 | Making Retirement Possible Starts With Clear Goals

Do you have a retirement goal, but it feels fuzzy? This may be one area that, once you get clear and defined, you realize there is no stopping your progress. In this episode, I will share 3 steps to create more specific goals for your money journey

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

✅ Why vague goals keep you stuck and how to shift them into clear statements

✅ Two key elements to make your money goals specific 

✅ How to test if your goal is realistic (and what to do if it’s not)

✅ The power of breaking big financial goals into milestones

💜 Book your free Retirement Ready Q&A Call

💰 Join the Retirement Ready Workshop

✨ Connect with me on Instagram

Transcript

 Welcome to the episode. Today we're talking about goals and why vague goals will keep you from moving forward. If you are just saying, well, I'm gonna retire one day, that's really. A plan of hope, we're hoping that will happen because there's no direction, there's no guidance. But I do think a lot of us struggle with the you know, the concept of goals, what it is, how to define it, and then what do I do next?

And I understand a struggle of mine as well. But I have a solution for you. I'm hosting a four day live challenge that will essentially help you understand how to create a goal and then turn it into action. So head over to Elevate Finances us back slash challenge to learn more, and I hope you'll join me.

But. This challenge is in September the 23rd through the 26th, and it is going to help you get clear on your goal and turn it into a 90 day win. There's an investment of $9, but this will help you get you on your journey to making retirement possible. All right, back to the episode today. Again, we're talking about goals.

I'm gonna be sharing a little bit about what we're talking about inside that challenge, where I will help you go deeper, and if you do attend the challenge, there's life coaching. There's your opportunity to ask specific questions for yourself, for your situations as everybody is different. But first, what are goals?

Goals are just basically things you want to achieve. I think sometimes we overthink this initial part, and so all you need to do is get your desires written down. Doing this step, and I'm gonna give you a question to answer, is part of what we will complete in the challenge as what I call an achievement statement.

I want you to answer the question, what is it that you want to achieve? And I just want you to freely answer this and as you're looking at this, you know, you might have several, but you might be thinking and keep going, this is a journaling more. You know, step one is, what do I wanna achieve?

And you start thinking about some thoughts and writing those down and keeping going. And, oh, what about this? And, oh, what about this? Just spend as much time as possible with these thoughts and ideas. Doing this will help you with the next step, I promise. You know, and once we get into that being able to really get this idea of a goal.

Idea of something you can achieve is so much easier to sit with initially. What is it you want to achieve? Write it all down. You're gonna have maybe more than one thing because if you are headed to retirement, you're gonna go, well, but I need to do this and I need to do this, and I wanna do this.

Great. All of them. All of them, because goals can be short. Mid or long-term, or a variety of both. If you've heard my story, I share how I had a short-term goal and a long-term goal, and that was my focus and that was where I sent my money. This will help you to be able to follow in that same, you know, idea of where does my money need to go.

Once you've exhausted like, what is it that you want to achieve, then we need to move on to step two. And you've probably heard about smart goals. And you're groaning. I know, because I do too. Anytime that pops up somewhere and I'm like, I know it's an acronym. I know it's supposed to help me create a goal, but it doesn't jive with me.

However, the S is important and I think the S is probably what most of us can understand and relate to. It is time for you to take all of your thoughts and ideas from step one and to get more specific. This will help you to set better money goals. I want you to take one. If you're looking at a sheet, you may not be doing this, but when you do this later, I want you to just start with one.

What is one of your desires? One of the things that you want to achieve and to get more specific with these, if they are money goals, these are the two things you're going to want to include in step two to get specific, and that is when do you want to achieve this, and how much do you need to do that?

Those are the two things that we need to answer for specific for a money goal. Step two, that is it. Understanding the timeline, which is when you're going to achieve this, and how much you need to get there. Is starting to define this goal into, okay, I'm seeing this develop and I know what it is.

Now if your question is like, well, I need to know how much I need to save for retirement, 'cause that's the number I've talked about it before, but it's also something that I help you answer inside my retirement roadmap session and understanding it for you and for your situation and what. That number looks like there's a lot of calculators out there, you know, information that way.

But I think it's important to use your numbers as much as possible. Once you've identified those two things, when and how much we now need to turn it into a yearly target. Okay, so I take it to a year because then we can evaluate if it is realistic or probable, I have an example to explain what I mean by realistic and probable.

If you want to retire in five years, yet you have not saved a penny, and you know you need to save 1.5 million. Saving 300 and thousand dollars a year is not realistic or probable. More than likely, but that is how you're looking at it. You're going, wow, okay. That isn't realistic, and I don't think it's probable.

Now, when I say probable, we can be realistic and go, yep, that's real to me, and I can do that now. Probable is kind of giving you that stretch. I think that's important. I think it's important to realize, okay, that. That is, you know, a possibility. I could probably do that. That's ideally where I want you to be, be.

But it's okay if it's just realistic. Getting as specific as you can with the numbers and the dates will help you understand this target. And now if you're like, okay. Hopefully this is not you. However, this individual, they can still make retirement possible. There's just some different things we have to address, but if you're like, okay, I've got my target, it is not quite realistic or probable.

Remembering your date and your amounts. Can you tweak 'em slight slightly? What does that look like? How does that feel? That is where you're going to lean into that and kind of start making some adjustments there. Maybe your goal was too aggressive, maybe, you know, there's lots of different ideas. This is the evaluation step to make sure it is realistic or probable.

Now the how. You've got your goal, you created your goal, three steps. We've got a goal. How do you put this into action? Well, I need you to ask yourself that. What actions do I need to take to make this happen? Big goals, that 300,000 can feel paralyzing because they're often too big to act on.

Now we've taken it down to a year to make it, you know, realistic and probable, but taking action on that in a year. Is still kind of vague, it's still not telling us exactly what we need to do. If you are paid biweekly in a year, you have 26 paychecks. If you are paid monthly, you have 12. These are your opportunities to do something for your goal, to take action on your goal.

Think of these as a cycle. Between paydays is a cycle of the things that I can do to achieve this goal. But what I want you to do is, you know, really bring this target down into milestones. Milestones are many finish lines along the way to your bigger, bigger dream. So let me, using another example to help you understand goals and targets and action steps.

Let's say your goal is to pay off 20,000. Of debt in three years, you wrote it down. Now you've made it. Is it realistic or probable? I hope by looking at a yearly breakdown at 7,000, and then you turn it into a monthly amount of $600 a month. Now, here is where you need to maybe adjust the timing.

In my live challenge, I share it for a 90 day win. Again, thinking about your paychecks, which are cycles of opportunities, it's either three or six in a 90 day. Gives you a little more wiggle room. But ask yourself what has to happen monthly, weekly, or even daily to make that milestone possible? And you're gonna wanna take these one at a time.

But these small, repeatable actions. Are what actually creates results. And this is what I call moving from a desire statement to an action system. And again, if you're looking for that life support, this is exactly what I'll walk you through inside my challenge. Now, vague goals will always stay vague until you take that step of breaking them down into achievable actions.

But really defining them correctly and following the steps to get you there will help you to be able to find those actions. And if you're thinking, I've tried this before and it hasn't worked. My challenge there. I'm just gonna give you a little sneak peek. There are a few more things to consider than what we've talked about today.

We've gotta balance what is going on as well as what we want to do, and. I'm gonna talk about all of that inside the challenge. Over the four days together, I will show you how to write a clear achievement statement, turn that into a realistic money goal, and then break it down into 90 day milestones, creating the actions for those 90 days.

Repeating that every 90 days is what's gonna find your momentum. We may need to start small as our first step in building confidence and seeing what can happen and if it's possible. But going through the system that I talk about in that make retirement possible challenge is what is going to help you to get results.

Again, it's happening live September 23rd through the 26th. And for just $9, you'll get four days of coaching clarity and action. Head over to Elevate Finances us slash challenge and grab your spot. This is the VE best first step that you can take to move from a vague idea or a vague goal to taking action that will help you make retirement possible.

I am so excited to share my method inside of this challenge. The method fits in my overall framework of the retirement ready framework from Clarity, which we talked about last episode plan, which there's a lot of plans that we need to have in place, but the action piece, which is this five step method inside my challenge to help you churn out results.

I hope you'll join me and I'll see you next episode.