5 money move musts to start now: Make financial goal

THE GIRL NINJA

Liza Gaspar

In The Girl Ninja’s last column, I talked about 5 Money Move Musts to Start Now. These Money Moves are:

1.     Make financial goal

2.     Create budget

3.     Record actual expenses

4.     Compare performance

5.     Revise money behavior

As promised, I will discuss each of these moves more in-depth in my succeeding columns. Shall we begin with

Money Move Must No. 1?

Make financial goal

Making the right financial goal is half the journey to financial freedom. Without a goal, your wealth building would be like a rudderless ship. I know, it’s cliché but can you actually picture a better one? Without a financial goal, how would you know where you want to be in a specific time frame? How would you know how much to save each time you earn? Or how much to spend?

As I mentioned, making a financial goal starts with identifying what you want to achieve, say, in the next 5 years, 10 years or even in the next few months give people a sense of being fully in control of their loves. Knowing what every financial and money decisions and actions you make at any point in time will give you a strong sense of direction and purpose. Perhaps the most important function of clearly identifying your financial goal is it gives you a support system to ground you whenever problems and challenges strike.

In making financial goals, I identified 5 Money Move Musts that you needed to do to make the right financial goal

1.     Make an umbrella goal

2.     Make medium-term goals

3.     Make short-term goals

4.     Evaluate Your Current Capacity

5.     Create Plans to Improve

Make an umbrella goal

In making your financial goal, identify an ‘umbrella’ goal which is very specific so you can measure your progress. For example, “I want to save P500,000 in 5 years.” This goal gives you a specific time frame and a quantifiable objective.

Make medium-term goals

From the umbrella goal, you can then make more specific goals such as how much you need to save in Years 1, 2, 3 and so on. For example, you want to save P50,000 in Year 1, P100,000 in Year 2 and so on. Remember that your capacity to actually achieve these goals is secondary here. In identifying what you want to achieve in life shouldn’t limit your dreams.

Make short-term goals

From your medium-term goals, narrow it down to short term goals such as saving P4,170 a month for the 12 months in Year 1.

Evaluate your current capacity

Now, this is where your capacity to achieve your short term goals come in. after identifying that you need to save P4,170 a month for the next 12 months and you know that in a good month, your take home pay is only P25,000 which is not even enough for your living expenses, it is now time to ask yourself:

How do I increase my income so I can save this much? This is actually the million-dollar question. I suggest you take a day going through your options. What I usually do is list 10-20 activities that I can do which will make me

extra money.

Create plans to improve

From the list of additional activities you identified which can help you achieve your goal, identify the 3 options that will most likely help you. Create a plan on how you can actually do these activities given everything that you are doing currently. Work on these activities everyday vis-à-vis your financial goals.

Remember that the money choices we make now dictates how financially healthy we will be in the future. Our financial wealth depends on the choices we make today for tomorrow and on whether we meet the challenges we meet given our financial goals.

If you need help in putting together a financial goal, shoot me an email and I will gladly help for free.IN my next articles, I will discuss each of the 5 Money Move Musts: How to Create a Budget.

Interesting Money Facts. I read this story about how a rare Persian carpet was sold for US$33.7 million in an auction sometime June 2013. It struck me as a funny thing – a literal rags to riches story, right? I can’t stop laughing about it.

With that amount, Napster billionaire Sean Parker can marry his wife, Alexandra Lenas, in the as lavish a ceremony as they had in their wedding last June 1 about 13 times. Parker and Lenas’ wedding ceremony reportedly cost around US$2.5 million. The lavish wedding featured Lord of the Rings-inspired attires and transformed a Big Sur (in California) hotel’s redwood-filled backyard into a fantastical forest sanctuary.

It was a dream wedding for the couple. What they didn’t dream about is the backlash that their extravagant wedding received. The backlash was so bad Mr. Parker wrote a 9,000 word scathing defense. That’s less than 10 times as long as this article.

Rich people problems, right? Problems I would love to have, don’t you too?

Liza Gaspar is a wealth coach and personal finance enthusiast. She spends her free time helping out with the projects of the Rotary Club of Makati McKinley

(rcmmckinley.org) and the Gerry Roxas Leadership Awardees (grlawardees.org). Visit

her Web site at thegirlninja.com, email her at liza@thegirlninja.com, or visit her at facebook.com/annalizagaspar and TheGirlNinja.com.