The Cowtown Chronicles

I’ve been teasing it for a week now, and here it is: the first of my new series about the changes I’m making in my financial life. This post will cover what I want to accomplish, and subsequent posts will outline the plan that I’m going to use to get there.

Goals: Not Just for Soccer Anymore

You can’t accomplish anything in life if you don’t set goals. You do it every day, even if it’s on a subconscious level. You may not even call them goals, but they are. For example, you want to get to work by 8AM. That’s a goal. The actions you take (or don’t take) to get to work by 8AM are the steps you subconsciously lay out to achieve your goal.

To really achieve life-changing things, you have to put a little more thought into what you’re going to do and also into the more nuanced aspects of your goals. Say for example that I set a goal of playing (and not looking like a donkey) in the Main Event of the 2010 World Series of Poker. That’s not the sort of thing where you just trundle along doing whatever comes to mind and expect to be able to accomplish it. All kinds of things need to be taken into account. Here are just a few things that I cooked up while thinking about it for 2 minutes:

• Where will you get the buy-in money?
• Where will you stay while the tournament is going?
• How will you improve your poker game until it’s at the level needed for that kind of tournament?
• Will you need backers?
• If you do need backers, who has that kind of money and would be willing to invest it in you?
• Are you going to enter by playing in satellites and online tournaments or saving up the buy-in?

So, sometimes goal setting is easy and requires no effort at all, and sometimes it causes you to really rack your brain to account for all the variables. But it’s still necessary. Jenna and I have had long discussions about what we want to achieve financially, and while we generally agree, we have different philosophies on how to get to where we want to be. I prefer to sweat the details and think constantly about the end goal, Jenna prefers to know what the end goal is but break it up into chunks which can then be automated as much as possible. Whatever works for you is the method you should use.

Down to brass tacks

Enough about setting goals already! What IS the goal that I’ve set?

By the time that I am 51 years old (20 years from now), I will be in a place financially where I will only work for pay because I WANT to, not because I NEED to.

That’s sort of my version of “one goal to rule them all.” There are sub-goals and associated numbers and calculations and whatnot, but that’s essentially it; Complete financial freedom in 20 years without winning the lottery or selling my company to Google.

The rest of this week will be dedicated to how I’m going to achieve my goal with ACTUAL NUMBERS and the exact steps we’re taking to get there.

For Tuesday: “The Reckoning”

debt reduction, personal, personal finance