I read somewhere (in a Pinterest article I think) that people are 42% more likely to accomplish their goals just by writing them down.  Now, I didn’t fact check this and I have no idea if it’s true, but it definitely got me thinking.

What are my financial goals?

I decided writing down my goals was important. I know my “why” in my head, but I want to see my “why” staring me in the face. If I’m having a bad day, I want to be able to flip to my goals and remind myself of how far we’ve come and why we are working so hard to improve our financial situation. Each goal has our start date and our hopeful target date for completion. Each goal also includes action steps to meet our goal and possible obstacles that could derail us.

We came up with a short-term, mid-term, and long-term financial goal.

For us, a short-term goal is from 0-3 months. Our goal is to get our credit card debt below $10,500 by the end of the year. I wrote out our goal, created some action steps to get there, identified some possible obstacles, and wrote why this goal is important to us. The biggest obstacle to this goal is Christmas. If we keep our Christmas spending in check, we will accomplish this goal for sure. We have a Christmas sinking fund, we just need to make sure to keep everything within budget.

Our short-term goal is from 3 months-1 year. We made this a savings goal. I have mentioned before that I am unhappy with our low savings. We currently have only $2,500 in our savings account. (We do have some other liquid monies, but our official emergency fund only has $2.500.) Therefor, our goal is to increase savings and have $6,000 in our emergency fund by August 31, 2024. This is a realistic goal and also takes into account some spending that will be happening throughout the next 10 months (a trip, some expensive purchases for our kids, etc.). We add $550 into our savings every month, but we do have to dip into our savings occasionally, so $6,000 is realistic and still attainable, but with our planned spending a little bit of a stretch… in a good way.

Finally, for our long-term goal we decided on 1-3 years. For our particular goal, we gave ourselves almost 2 years from writing the goal to our target end date. Our long-term goal is to be credit card debt free by 8/31/25.  It’s been a long slog already, but most of that is due to our yo-yo debting. The last 18 months we have made good progress and decreased our total credit card debt by more than half. I’m hoping the next 18 months are as successful! We should be able to make this goal by our target date and with any luck, will actually finish it sooner. We wanted our goals to be stretch goals, but also to be realistic.

Our goals are SMART goals. They are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound. We just need to work towards them and push ourselves to be responsible!

Writing our goals down has renewed my sense of purpose in our financial lives. I like being able to look at my goals and determine if I am on track or not. I like being able to look at my goals and know that we are making progress. Having my goals written down and seeing the progress gives me a sense of accomplishment and helps me to stay the course because it makes me accountable. I think sharing my goals will do the same thing.