The ONLY person who can motivate you to do certain things is YOU. However, if you are to achieve some of the objectives enumerated here, you have to take action to achieve them. Whether it is setting yourself financial goals, making a budget (and adhering to it!), tracking your financial progress, you need to be motivated enough to do it yourself.
Success happens, when you do. Not when you dream. Great people have achieved success by making it a habit to do things daily, not yearly. So do it. Now. No education, at least in India, prepares you for the most important task of handling money.
Let us learn to make our money work harder. Human beings who save can be classified into 2 broad categories. The first ones earn, save (which they invest) and then spend. For this category, saving comes as a habit and a pleasure. For them freedom means doing what they like. They do not need their professions.
The second category saves towards a particular goal. For them the EMI cheque or the SIP cheque comes with a great degree of “sacrifice”. Thus it is a survivor mindset. Start saving / investing today. Put the awfully powerful tool of compounding to work. Act.
Financial goal setting:
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to”, said the Cat.
“I do not much care where….” Said Alice
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go”, said the Cat.
Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll.
In my experience in financial planning, I have found this to be the most important and most difficult exercise that you have to do to achieve a financial goal.
Most of us have dreams. If you put a date and time to the dream, it becomes a goal. A dream can be in the air, a goal is written down on a piece of paper.
Get into an exercise of writing your goals. Goals are what you wish to have, places to go, what you wish to read, and so on.
Enumerate your goals and let it flow freely, do not try to stop the thought process.
I wish to lose 5 kg
I wish to be a millionaire
I wish to buy a bigger house
What do you observe?
Almost all of them have some financial implication.
Are all fond wish “statements”.
Goals, however, require you to be more precise, clear and have a start and end date. Let’s look at some goal statements:
I wish to buy a 3 bedroom house by Jan xxxx, funded by my own funds in Chembur.
I wish to buy a blue colour Trident Star car costing R 27, 00,000 by December
xxxx, fully funded by the sale of the equity mutual funds in which I am currently investing.
Financial goal setting is the process you use to set your direction in life.
PV Subramanyam
writes at www.subramoney.com and has authored the best seller ‘Retire
Rich - Invest C40 a day’