I’m Luke Hanson, Financial Adviser and Director at My Financial Design. How much time and money will it take to achieve your goals? The 2nd step in achieving goals is to Cost It!
The start of the year, is an opportunity to set ourselves up, for new goal achieving. Once we’ve taken the time to write down our goal, the second step is to cost it. Whether we’re looking to achieve our goal in the long-term or the short-term, this second step of measuring what it will cost will help us greatly. Before we look at a financial cost, let’s explore another cost consideration, time. Whilst it’s easy to say, “I’ll give whatever time it takes.” I encourage you to be a little bit more specific. And not only the amount of time, but whose time will it cost. Take for example, my goal of learning to speak Spanish. I’ve taken the view that if I want to do this by myself or wait for my wife to come up with a lesson plan for me, things may take longer than I’d like. So instead I’ve engaged the help of a language tutor. Making the call on whether we want to solely spend our own time or get the help of others along the way is a cost consideration to think through. This is a common reason why clients reach out to partner with me in getting financial advice, they simply don’t have the time to take a DIY approach and do things on their own. Then of course, there is the financial cost of achieving our goals. To increase the likelihood of success we not only need to find out how much things will cost and what expenses might be involved along the way, but come up with a plan for how we’re going to fund our goals. Perhaps a trade-off needs to be made between discretionary spending and investing money into achieving the goals we’ve written down. Empowering ourselves by knowing the cost in advance will help us prioritise and allocate our time and finances accordingly. Taking this approach with the context of our long-term goal of being financially independent will require knowing how much money we need to be setting aside and investing each month into our retirement nest egg while we’re still working. If you require some help working out what amount this is for you and your family, reach out to me and we can start a conversation.