How To Set And Stay Committed To Your Financial Goals

So you’re ready to accomplish your financial goals. Here's how to change your money beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, and habits.

Originally published Dec. 30, 2019

A new year is coming, and you’re ready to finally accomplish your financial goals. You’ve written the vision and made it plain. You’ve created a beautiful vision board so you can manifest your dreams. You’ve listened to a couple of financial podcasts and read a couple of articles on saving and managing your money. You’re all set, right? Wrong!

You’ve created a set of new financial goals, yet your money beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, and habits are all the same. You know what they say: You can’t expect different results doing the same thing.

Don’t set yourself up to financially fail.

This year, set financial goals that are important to you, where you build a better relationship with your money. To let past money mistakes go. To use the results of others as inspiration, not as what you should be doing. Just because she paid off $353,745 in debt in two years doesn’t mean that it will work for your income or lifestyle.

So just for a moment, ignore all the advice you’ve heard, clear your mind of what you think you should achieve next year, and let go of the old goals you’ve been copying from year to year.

Envision what you want your lifestyle to look like in the next two to three years. Dream and stretch your faith.

That vision is what your goals should be financially supporting.

Use these three tips to help create new financial goals for the “New Year, New Me” vibe you have going on.

Identify what you financially value.

Think back to that vision. What were the valuable things that would bring you happiness and wealth? Maybe it’s creating a freedom fund, or paying down debt.

Believe you can actually accomplish it.

Revisit the vision. It’s perfectly fine to have a vision that you may need to exercise faith in. But you don’t want the vision to be so big that fear, doubt, and scarcity overrule and talk you out of believing you can achieve and deserve it. You’ll end up self-sabotaging the very thing you want the most due to your lack of belief.

Create a list of tools and tasks to help you stay focused on achieving your vision.

Setting up an automatic transfer to your freedom fund, pulling your credit report, creating a debt snowball plan and not using your credit cards, using software to help you budget and track your finances.

That vision won’t manifest on its own; you’ll need money to create, maintain, and sustain it. Don’t give up: Show yourself grace and forgiveness, making the vision better.

Your present circumstances don’t dictate the level of your future wealth. When it comes to your goals, remember one key financial question: Is this contributing to my vision or distracting me from it?