How To Structure Your Personal Financial Goals

Before you start setting your financial goals, you need to be very clear about your planning horizon.

How far into the future are your financial projections? One month? Three years? Thirty years?

To make the planning process manageable, it helps to structure your plan into three broad categories: short-term, medium-term and long-term.

Short-Term Financial Goals

Ideally these are goals that you can realistically accomplish within the next twelve months.

These can include learning how to save, not getting into any more debt, learning how to manage your money better and starting to strictly adhere to a budget.

Achieving short-term goals is very important because it gives you the confidence and inspiration to accomplish more.

In most cases, the level of discipline required at this stage tends to be extremely high.

Medium-Term Financial Goals

With medium term financial goals, you are typically looking at what you should accomplish within the next 3 to 5 years.

These are definitely more ambitious than short-term goals but they need very careful attention.

Financial goals in this category can include retirement planning, paying off your mortgage early to avoid paying excessive interest, and creating passive income vehicles that will allow you to achieve financial freedom.

Long-Term Financial Goals

When dealing with long-term financial goals, you are looking at a planning horizon that goes beyond 5 years.

It is interesting to note that many financially successful people have financial goals that stretch up to 20 years and beyond.

The further you plan into the future, the easier it becomes to align your actions with your goals.

Goals in this category typically include: where to send your children to college, how to afford your ideal or dream life, and accomplishing what it is you believe you were put on this earth to do.

Your imagination of what you believe you can achieve becomes the limit.

The moment you structure your financial goals in the three broad categories above, you can easily identify what you have to do every day to get closer to achieving them. You will also be able to prioritize your financial achievements by knowing which goals to focus on first.