Personal Goal Setting

Before you develop a personal budget, you really need to do some personal goal setting. If you don't you might find that the resulting budget plan is anything but achievable!

Why Goal Setting is Important

Goal setting is an essential part of the process of managing your personal finances.

Unless you have some idea of what you want to achieve your tendency will be to make rash or short term decisions about your money.

Goals and Motivation

Goals can provide motivation or they can be utterly demoralizing!

For a goal to have the desired effect they need to be realistic, but designed to move you away from your current situation. They should be achievable but challenging. If you do not need to put in any effort then you will quite quickly find yourself wondering why you would bother.

Goals also need to be designed to achieve the effect you really want. Do you want to be rich or just comfortable, and what do those words actually mean to you?

To be a motivating force, goals also need to be aligned with your personal values and core beliefs. If not you will not achieve them no matter how hard you try!

Goal Setting Process

Rather than just plucking a goal or two out of the air, there is actually a process you can go through to develop your personal goals and to make sure that the goals you select are truly what you want in your life.

Often we set goals because we think achieving them will improve out lives or make us happy only to find after a lot of work working towards our goal that the end result doesn't work.

So, need to know what the process is for developing your goals?

Goal Setting Skills

Although there are some skills that are useful for the goal setting process, anyone can do it. All it takes is a bit of knowledge about how to go about it, a desire to change or improve your financial situation and the perseverance to work your way through the process from start to finish.

Goal Setting Mistakes

If you are aware of the potential pitfalls in setting your goals, you just might be able to avoid them!

Goal Setting Tools

If this is your first attempt at setting real goals you might find some goal setting tools useful. On this page you will find a number of documents that have been designed to help you to work through the goal setting process.

Other Goal Setting Resources

On this page you will find information about other goal setting resources that you might find useful as you going through the process of developing your goals.

Return to top of Personal Goal Setting