Our last post on spending money effectively discussed the importance of opportunity cost. You can read the post here.
We now know the basic principles for spending money with the goal of sustainable happiness. We need to buy experiences and not stuff. We need to have these experiences often enough to rejuvenate our lives and conquer stress. We need to honestly assess opportunity costs in order to decide what costs are too high and to know exactly what we are giving up with every choice that we make. Now what?
One of the important benefits of financial planning is that we are forced to evaluate what we really want in life. For many of us, our financial plan is the first important goal-setting experience of our lives. When we think about it, most goals in our lives have been set by others. We begin with our parents setting our goals, then our teachers, and finally our employers. The actual process of setting our own unique goals is something that most of us have never learned.
In upcoming blog posts, we will discuss some basics of goal setting along with common challenges and pitfalls. We will learn that most goals are actually several goals linked together. We will also discuss how not to pursue the wrong goals, a problem that consistently reoccurs and kills people’s hopes and dreams.