Week 5 – Develop Your Financial Freedom Goals & Systems

Here in week 5, we’ll begin setting the Financial Freedom goals for ourselves.  If you have completed the lessons in the previous weeks, identifying our goals should be relatively easy and straightforward.  This is because by developing what we truly desire and want (aka our Life Vision), our goals become readily apparent.  

This article is part of our 52 Week Financial Freedom Series! It is our goal that everyone has the tools to becoming and living financially free, so we want to take you through a 52 week journey that you can undertake towards becoming financially free.

You can start in any week that you choose, though I would recommend doing the series week-by-week as we have laid out each week to build upon the last. Enjoy and Upwards and Onwards towards Financial Freedom!

Develop Your Financial Freedom Goals & Systems

So now is the time to pull out your lists from previous weeks and begin the review process.  I want you to take 20-30 minutes to review everything you’ve put together thus far.  That means going over your ranked list of what you desire and your Financial Freedom vision.  

Now you might be asking yourself, “How does the vision differ from goal setting?  Haven’t I already completed this step?”

In part, yes.  By setting your vision for your life, you have begun the very first step of identifying what it is that you truly desire.  Though your vision differs from goals in one important aspect – with your vision, the sky’s the limit.  You are tasked with laying out what you truly want irrespective of how you plan to get it.  So if your vision is to be financially independent by the time you are 45, you lay that out as your life’s vision regardless of the machinations necessary to make it come to fruition.  Which brings us to goal and systems creation: the next vitally important step necessary to achieve your vision.  

Once you have a chance to review your vision list, let’s start brainstorming the goals necessary to get to where you need to be.  In taking the previous example – the vision of being financially independent by the time you are 45 – what goals can you set to help you achieve that vision?

This is where the hard part comes into play.  You must now identify things you can do to make your vision a reality.  This means that we need to anchor ourselves in the realm of reality and set goals that are not only inspiring, but achievable.  Here you need to ensure that the goal is something you can actually achieve – this will require you to crunch the numbers and formulate a specific plan.  

S.M.A.R.T. Goals

In a great motivational talk (NSFW) by the late-great Ultimate Warrior, he lays out a great thing to keep in mind.  He says if your goal is to save $100,000, but you only make $500/week, it would not be realistic to set a goal of saving $100,000 in a one years time.  This is just not achievable. 

Rather you need to set a goal that is not only motivating but doable.  Remember our acronym regarding goal setting, S.M.A.R.T:

S – Specific

M – Measurable

A – Achievable

R – Realistic

T – Definite time frame

Here are some examples of my personal specific Financial Freedom Goals:

• $100,000/yr in passive income
• Write 100 books
• Beat last year’s active income (continually growing my AI level)
• Build two websites for customers/mo.  

Now keep in mind these are goals that help keep me motivated and on task towards what I’m trying to achieve.  We have yet to define the systems necessary to achieve these goals.  That will come in subsequent steps.  For me though, seeing these goals written out on paper and tracking my progress towards achieving those goals is a very motivating factor that drives me on a daily basis.  

Here is how I currently track towards these goals: 

• $8,300/yr. In passive income
• 2 books written and published, 1 in progress
• On track to not beat last years income (must readjust)
• Building out 1 website/mo. (need to build more lead generation tools)

As you can see, monitoring my progress towards goal achievement helps me on two fronts: 

1. It keeps me motivated as I can see progress.
2. It helps me track where I’m at towards achieving a specific goal.  This allows me to recalibrate my efforts where needed.

But we can’t stop here.  We need to take things one step further and identify the systems needed to achieve those goals. 

What are systems?  Systems are things we can do on a daily basis towards the achievement of our goals.  

Creating Systems Towards Goal Achievement

Think of systems as the way that we can break down our high-level goals into daily, actionable steps of achievement. 

A few things to keep in mind about creating systems: 

1. Systems need to be repeatable.   
2. Systems need to be easy enough to be achievable.  For instance, if I had a goal of losing 15 pounds and identified 4 hours of running each day as the system to achieve that goal, I would say that system is not achievable because the daily time investment is very intensive.  Perhaps start out with ‘10 push-ups each morning’ instead.  
3. When creating systems, think through all the possibilities.  So for instance, if you want to achieve the goal of paying down your mortgage early, perhaps you need to get a better paying job in addition to monthly debt repayment.  So one of your systems might be ‘Apply to 2 jobs per day’.  
4. Adopt the less is more mindset.  Be careful with systems creation.  It’s all too easy to build up the idea of creating 30 systems to achieve 5 high-level goals.  I would say that it’s much better to limit the number of systems to actionable daily items or even reduce the number of high-level goals that you are seeking to achieve at one time.  

So for the goals above, here are some of the systems I might have in place: 

• $100,000/yr in passive income
  • Spend 15 minutes per day reviewing stocks
  • Spend 30 mins per day writing in a new book (this applied to ‘Write 100 books’ as well) 
• Write 100 books
  • Write at 5am every morning (be as specific as possible. Identifying the time that you will do a thing helps in this realm).
• Beat last year’s active income (continually growing my AI level)
  • Apply to 1 new job per day that will pay higher than my current position.  
  • Spend 30 mins each day to learn a new skill that will help improve my negotiating power for a raise or higher-level position.  
• Build two websites for customers/mo.
  • Contact 3 potential customers per day to develop a pipeline.   

I could keep building on, but again the goal is to have these systems be repeatable.  Ensure that you can easily repeat a system and you will build the habit towards achieving your goals and thus the life of your dreams.   

WEEKLY FOCUS

This week your task is to begin formulating your own goals and systems towards achievement.  

Here are a few steps that you can take: 

1. Start small.  Don’t bit off more than you can chew – focus on defining and building one goal at a time.  
2. Prioritize.  Focus on developing and identifying the highest-priority goal first and build the systems around the achievement of that goal.  
3. Think realistic.  Don’t feel the need to do 20 goals with 100+ systems around those goals.  That would not be realistic or achievable.  Rather, seek to do your 1 or 2 most important goals first and move on from there.  Remember that you want daily, repeatable actions.  

Do not delay and be sure to get started today!  This process may take a little longer than a week and that’s ok.  The key is that you begin and become comfortable with this necessary step in goal creation. 

Disclosure: I am/We are long $AAPL $ABT $ADM $ALL $BG $BGS $BP $BUD $CAG $CAT $CLX $CMI $COF $CSCO $DAL $DFS $F $FAST $GD $GE $GIS $GT $HBI $IBM $INGR $IRM $JNJ $JPM $KHC $KMB $KO $KSS $LUMN $MMM $MSFT $NWL $PEP $PFE $PG $SBUX $SJM $SPTN $STAG $STX $T $TSN $UPS $VZ $WBA $WEN $WFC $WMT $WPC $WRK $WY $XOM

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