7 Strategies for Exceeding Your Financial Goals

Mastering your money management skills has always been important. With inflation eating into our spending power, it’s more important than ever! 

If you want to successfully navigate today’s challenging economic landscape and exceed your financial expectations, here’s what you’ve got to do:

Strategy #1: Categorize and Prioritize Your Goals

All goals fall into three categories: critical, need, and want. Once you’ve fully realized and written out your financial goals, you need to give them that hierarchy of priority. It will help you to stay focused on the most pressing – and most impactful – financial goals. A critical goal may be to develop your emergency fund or save up for a pressing home repair. You need to invest. You want to buy a new lawnmower.

This isn’t to say you can’t work on goals of different priorities at once – but it does mean you know where to focus if you encounter unexpected financial circumstances.

Strategy #2: Time Your Goals 

Think about short-term (6 months to 5 years), mid-term (5 years to 10 years), and long-term (10+ years) financial goals. This can influence their priority, too, but recognize that long-term goals need time. Just because the goal post is far in the future doesn’t mean you can put it off. Investments are a prime example – the more time you give them to grow, the better your returns will be.

Strategy #3: Get Real About Deadlines

If you can attach a deadline to your goal, do it. When will the kids head off to college? When do you want to take that jet-setting anniversary trip? When do you want to get Christmas shopping done this year? Close at hand or far in the future, these deadlines help you track and evaluate your progress. Even if nothing will happen if you don’t meet the deadline, set them anyway!

Ambiguity will not motivate you to make necessary changes.

Strategy #4: Progress Over Paralysis

Money management can be a lot like setting a new year’s resolution. You’re going to fail if you bite off more than you can chew. Rather than making drastic budget changes or lofty financial goals, plan to start small and incrementally increase as you see success. For example, start by saving an extra 2% of your income, slowly increasing each month as you’re able.

Strategy #5: Account for Every Dollar

While there are great benefits to today’s digitized and automatic banking systems, there’s something big we miss out on when not balancing the checkbook the old-fashioned way. We lose out on a clear and exact picture of where our money is going and what it’s doing. You should know what your expenses are, especially the recurring and auto-charged expenses. Track down those forgotten subscription services. You’ll be able to know just how much you’re spending and where there’s fat to be cut!

Strategy #6: Account for Changes

Inflation is on everyone’s mind. The average person knows that they’re paying more for gas and groceries, but plenty of people don’t have the budget in place to know how much more. Now more than ever, you should be revisiting and adjusting your budget to account for inflation. You’ll be able to more clearly see how and where expenses have ballooned and where you’re going to have to cut back.

Strategy #7: Fight Temptations

Speaking of cutting back…

If you want to smash your financial goals, you’re going to have to give some stuff up. That means fighting temptation at every turn. You probably know what your financial weak points are: the hobbies you like to indulge in, the expensive leisure activities, the frivolous-but-dopamine-charged shopping sprees.

Knowing this about yourself, curb temptations. Don’t go window shopping or wandering around stores without an explicit purpose. Don’t go to the grocery store on an empty stomach. Remove saved credit card details from online retailers so that you can’t buy on impulse. Add things to your wish list instead of to your cart.

Go out less, and when you do, choose free or low-cost activities. At restaurants, limit your order and avoid money sinks, like alcohol, which can add up fast.

Being intentional with your money doesn’t just mean budgeting and saving – it means eliminating opportunities to be wasteful and impulsive.