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Setting financial goals is a common part of annual goal planning. Everyone wants to see themselves progress during the year and hopefully end the year in a better place than they began.
The one factor that makes or breaks a good financial goal is accountability. To reach any goal, you need some sort of measurement or way to evaluate your effort. In this article, you will find the ways to hold yourself accountable with financial goals.
These tips will help anybody who has ever struggled with making meaningful progress with their finances and wants to begin something different.
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What Are Examples of Financial Goals
The financial goals that you set are totally dependent on your priorities. And your current financial situation. A single parent living from paycheck-to-paycheck will have different priorities from a recent college graduate who is looking for a job.
Your financial goals are personal to you and should cater to your experience. You can set more ambitious goals as you progress in your journey; however, I would recommend starting simple.
Some great financial goals that you could set are:
- Have a full month of expenses saved.
- Get your credit card balance under 30% of the total usage limit.
- Improve your credit score by X amount of points.
- Have a no-spend month.
- Invest 10 dollars every week.
If you feel like these goals are too simple or too challenging, you are free to modify them however you like. These goals should serve as a good starting point.
How can I be accountable with money?
Staying accountable with money truly begins with assessing your relationship with money.
This can impact the choices you make regarding money and the time you choose to designate towards your money. It ultimately comes down to the life that you want to live. Once, you figure out what that looks like, you can plan accordingly with your money.
Some people see money as a measure of their self-worth, so they hoard and store it. Others may see money as something that you can never have enough of, so they burn through it quickly.
Your current money psychology has a lot to do with the choices you make around your money right now. If you are unhappy with your financial situation, you may need to evaluate your thoughts about money.
How to Hold Yourself Accountable With Financial Goals
It’s great to set financial goals; however, the goals you set will do you no good if you do not create an actionable plan to achieve them. We want to look back at the end of the year and see that we were able to make progress towards the things that we designated as important.
Staying accountable to your financial goals requires effort and active participation and curiosity about your finances.
Personal finance is a long journey that will evolve over the course of your life. Therefore the sooner you create systems and solve this accountability problem, the easier time you will have achieving your financial goals.
Set Goals
The first step to hold yourself accountable with financial goals is to set the goals.
Goals are a great tool to use when you want to work on accountability because they serve as a benchmark you can use to measure your progress. They are flexible enough that they can be modified over time to better suit your needs. They are also great because you can use them to see how far you’ve come.
I can’t stress enough that personal finance is a journey to be taken over a very long period of time. Your goals will change as you go through life; however, you will always need a way to move yourself toward the person you want to be who is living the life you want to live.
I recommend that you have short, mid, and long-term goals for a more well-rounded idea of where you want your finances to go.
Short Term Goals
Good short-term goals should allow you to make some sort of daily progress. In personal finance, you will find that there are significant changes you can make today.
Some examples of short-term goals you can make are:
- Save 5$ a day.
- Call your bank to have a fee waived.
- Find out your loan balances and interest rates.
- Buy a budgeting spreadsheet online.
- Consolidate your bank accounts.
These goals will move you forward towards a financially whole life.
They should not require a whole lot of effort, they just require your dedication. Short-term goals can be the easy wins that you need to motivate you to attempt larger goals.
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Mid Term Goals
Mid-term goals are the bridge between the short and long-term goals. Depending on the timeline you set, they can be from 6 months to a few years.
The goals require more effort than short-term goals, but they still allow you to progress and evaluate for a longer period.
Some examples on mid-term goals can be:
- Max out your Roth IRA
- Save an emergency fund that will last for 6 months.
- Pay off student loans.
- Read 5 personal finance books
- Save for an international vacation.
These goals probably won’t happen in the next week, but allow you to track your actions over the course of a year. Mid-term goals can help you hold yourself accountable with financial goals.
Long Term Goals
These are the goals that you may have to break up into smaller portions, but completing them can give you the most satisfaction. Usually, your short and mid-term goals build up to your long-term goals.
Long-term financial goals can be:
- Saving for a house downpayment
- Save 1 year’s salary
- But an investment property
- Reach $100K net worth
- Save for a vacation to host your extended family.
These goals take time and make the largest difference in your personal finances. Achieving these goals can take years of dedication and navigating through setbacks.
Your shorter-term goals can contribute to your long-term goals which can impact the vision you have for your life.
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Find an Accountability Partner
A great way to hold yourself accountable with financial goals is to share your goals with someone else. By making your goals public, you involve others’ perceptions of you.
This can be a great motivator for people to accomplish the things that they say they are going to do.
Involving other people in your journey gives them the opportunity to share your excitement when you reach milestones. Having other people celebrate your wins and hold you accountable in the areas where you fall short will increase your chances of success during the process.
Increase Your Knowledge
When you are ignorant, you may have a target to blame for your mistakes. This is not what we want if the goal is to see our financial circumstances change.
Increasing your knowledge is a great way to hold yourself accountable with financial goals because it raises the bar. By learning better ways to manage your money, you are more likely to take part in these methods.
You also remove the need to hire someone to manage your finances for you. Financial advisors can be beneficial; however, the return on investment of your learning about your own finances will outperform the returns that a financial advisor may be able to get you.
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Track Your Progress
Tracking your progress is a great way to hold yourself accountable with financial goals because you’ll have a clearer picture of the results of your actions.
You can better associate which decisions you made brought you closer to your goals and vice versa. This is extremely important because you will have a tangible record of your progress. This can hold you accountable as well as motivate you.
The app that I use to make tracking my finances super easy is called YNAB. If you are a learner, you’ll find the graphs and pie chart to be a wonderful resource! You can begin your 34-day free trial here.
By becoming familiar with your numbers, you can make better financial decisions. The decisions will move you towards achieving your goals.
Reward Yourself
Creating a rewards system is a fabulous way to hold yourself accountable with financial goals. An effective reward system will allow you to build discipline and help you practice delayed gratification.
Money should help you achieve a more fulfilling life. It is not something that you should be afraid to spend.
When it is appropriate, you should reward yourself for your hard work because this journey is not easy. You have to take the time to celebrate and acknowledge your progress.
You will go much farther if you can find ways to keep your financial goals challenging and interesting. Extrinsic motivation can be a great ally to intrinsic motivation when used appropriately.
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Automate Your Finances
Automating your finances has to be one of the easiest ways to hold yourself accountable financially. The whole set-it-and-forget-it system works wonders once you do the initial work.
If you want to hold yourself accountable with financial goals, automating your finances is great because the computer does the “hard work” for you.
The only obstacle between you and your financial goals after you automate your finances is stopping the automation.
Automating your bill withdrawals or contributions requires you to have the money where you say you’ll have it on time. This pressure can encourage you to regulate your spending so that your obligations are covered.
Check In Often
To ensure that you hold yourself accountable with financial goals, you will need to check in with your goals often.
You have to see your financial goals often and think about them, to keep them as a priority. If you want to make meaningful progress with your goals, they can’t be out of sight or out of mind.
This goes for your tracking system too. When you first begin your journey, you will need to become very familiar with your finances. You should do this to get a more accurate idea of how you spend your money, not how you think you spend your money.
Managing your finances begins with understanding them. If you put in the work to track and monitor your finances, you will be much more accountable to your financial goals.
Conclusion
This guide to holding yourself accountable with financial goals will help you improve your finances. All of the tips in this guide will help you make better decisions regarding your finances and help you become financially whole.
If there are any tips that I missed in this guide, feel free to add them to the comments below! If you want to explore more content like this, you can check out my Pinterest!