New year’s resolutions: Personal, Financial and Lifestyle goals
Date: December 19, 2014
With another year drawing to an end, the Christmas / New year period is a time for people of all ages to reflect on what has happened in the recent past and look forward towards what may come. Naturally enough, goal setting – often in the form of new year resolutions – features high on the agenda in January, but unfortunately by the time February comes around and the day to day pressures of life get in the way, many of those goals have been long forgotten.
Goal setting is about more than just the vision of what you want to achieve – that’s the easy part. Effective goal achievement is about anticipating the winding paths you may encounter along the way, and being able to manage them as / when your journey needs to take a different route. That’s where the team at Adviser fp can help.
With this in mind, we’d like to share with you a simple sketch about this very topic from Carl Richards, a Certified Financial Planner (CFP) in the United States and the highly acclaimed creator of the weekly Sketch Guy column in the New York Times (www.behaviorgap.com).
Through his simple sketches, Carl makes complex financial concepts easy to understand and his talent is so well-regarded that his artwork has appeared in a range of showings including The Parson’s Gallery in New York, The Shultz Museum, and an upcoming exhibit at the Mansion House in London. His commissioned work is on display in businesses and educational institutions across the globe.
Many of us are really clear about our current reality. We may even have a pretty good idea of where we’d like to end up 20, even 30 years from now. But the path between today and the future rarely stays straight. In fact, I suspect Jane’s brother-in-law would confirm that over the course of 39 years as a trader, life zigged and zagged more often than expected. But despite all that back and forth, he’s managed to make it to the goal of retiring. I expect he’d also say it took a lot of course corrections to reach this point. Course corrections are simple adjustments we make along the way to get us back on track. Imagine flying a plane from Los Angeles to Boston. After taking off, the wind currents throw you a little off course. If you don’t course correct, and continue to correct as needed throughout the flight, you could end up in Miami instead of Boston. The same is true with our goals. The future can look really clear from our current reality, but we need to remember life happens. Things will distract us, maybe even pull us way off course. But as long we stay aware of our current reality and where we want to be, we can get back on track and headed towards our goals.