Financial Goals: What Are Mine?
For those of you who have been reading this blog the past couple months, you know I’ve been craving “novelty and progress.” It led me to read a book about financial independence. Then there was this big decision for our family. Through it all, I’ve been wondering, “What are our financial goals?” It seems to me that Matt and I will have a much harder time reaching our goals if we don’t really know what they are!
We sat down to flesh them out together. Here’s what we came up with:
Our Financial Goals
- We want to live in a home that feels like a sanctuary and lifts our souls on a daily basis.
- We want to live in a home that other kids and families want to come to.
- As long as we live in a really hot climate, we want to have a pool.
- We want to be able to afford multiple vacations a year. (Spring Break, Summer, Fall Break, Thanksgiving, and Winter Break), including international travel.
- We want to be able to subsist on only 1.25-1.5 full-time jobs when the boys are in middle school. That way, we will have more time/capacity as a family to support them.
- We want to be able to send the boys to college so they can start their lives debt-free.
- We want to be prepared for the financial hardship that will come from climate change in the coming decades.
- Then there’s health insurance! We want to be able to afford continuous health insurance. (This currently costs us about $1,200 per month 🙁
- We want to have a secure retirement. We don’t want to have to worry about how to afford each additional year of our lives. Additionally, we don’t want to worry about the increasing costs that come from aging.
- We want to be able to donate money to causes we care about.
What are your financial goals? I would love to compare ours to yours to see if there’s anything Matt and I should add to our list!
4 Comments
Claire McCabe
Becoming debt free was a huge one that I achieved a couple years ago before I was married. Now my husband and I have a (huge) mortgage, but our goal is to pay it off early! In the meantime, we will live with no other debt whatsoever and continue to pay for everything in cash.
Sara Cotner
That’s awesome, Claire! Staying debt-free (besides your mortgage) is awesome. Matt and I are currently debt-free besides our mortgage, but our cars are getting really old. I want to figure out how to not go into debt when we need new cars (i.e., buying older cars, downsizing to just one car, etc.). As far as your mortgage goes, everything I read says that mortgage debt is good, depending on your interest rate! The money that you could put into paying off your mortgage only earns you about 3-4% but the money you put into the stock market (or into additional real estate) could earn you more than that! Just something to think about. I’m still trying to figure out how to navigate all of this.
Sarah
Love seeing your goals written out. Our goals seem much more vague in comparison, so it is interesting to think about how we would describe them with more specifics. I’m curious how you plan to prioritize yours. Are you thinking about focusing on certain ones now (traveling, saving for college, etc.) and others later? Or trying to do a bit of everything? Or saving it all in one pot and using it as needed to various goals? Personal finance is endlessly fascinating. 🙂
Sara Cotner
Thanks for chiming in, Sarah! You and Neil are such savers! The problem with our goals is that they are primarily simultaneous! We need to save money for college NOW and retirement NOW but we also want to go on vacations NOW while our children are home with us. Usually the things that get sacrificed are the long-term things (like retirement) and college, which is why I’m now freaking out. College is just 8.5 years away for us. I just keep hearing the advice rattling around in my head about how much money compounds over time. We don’t have a lot of money compounding because we have spent it on things like vacations every year. And COVID sort of forced us down to 1 full-time job (even though the boys aren’t in middle school). Matt is really struggling to support their half-day schedule AND work part-time.