How to Create Manageable Goals: Success Secrets

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Kerul Kassel on behalf of Expert Village. In this segment we're going to talk about how to make goals more manageable by chunking them down to size. When you've got a big goal, that big goal can be intimidating. So, how do you make it so you can approach it in a way that doesn't feel like you're walking up a mountain? Well, here's how. We're going to take a long term goal and break it down. We're going to have an objective and that objective is secure retirement. We're going to break that down. If we want a secure retirement let's take a long time because if we're in debt now it's going to take a long time to get there. So, if in ten years we want secure retirement and you know, you'll make these whatever you want them to be, I'm just giving you a floor example here. If in ten years you want a secure retirement then in five years perhaps you'll be 25% of the way to having your savings in investments, starting to grow so that by ten years time you'll be able to have your secure retirement. Or, at least a lot more secure than it is now. In one year then, if this is where you want to be in five, where do you need to be in one year? So, what we're doing is we're backing up from this goal, this objective, and we're backing it down so that it can be more manageable. So, if in five years we can get to 25% of income in savings, and we're 25% of the way to secure retirement, in one year we want to have our debt paid off. Well, that sounds a little more manageable, doesn't it? So then, if we want to have our debt paid off in one year, then where do we need to be in six months to do that? Well, perhaps in six months we have 50% of our debt paid off. So then if that's the case, this month, what do we need to do? Maybe we can pay 10%. 10% of our debts in one month isn't so bad, it's not so awful. Then what do we need to do this week in order to achieve 10% of debts paid off by the end of the month? Well, maybe we need to refinance our credit card debt, maybe we need to cancel subscriptions, perhaps to cable TV, magazines. Maybe we need to go to just a cell phone instead of a land line, so there's a lot of things we can do in terms of spending less money. So, what do we need to do today, because today is really where we need to start. We need to create a budget. We need to know how much money is coming in and how much money is going out so that we can balance it so we can pay off our debts."