This week’s theme on the Retirement Quick Tips Podcast is: Financial Resolutions For 2023

Today, I’m talking about the first step in setting a worthwhile goal or resolution for 2023, something you’ll want to be clear about before setting one or several new goals for yourself, and that is to focus on what matters most. 

Sure, you could set a goal to stop wasting money on takeout coffee or food this year, but you first want to make sure that setting this goal will actually have a meaningful impact on your life. For some it will, but for others, your daily Starbucks, even at $6 a day, most days of the year, isn’t all that important to meeting your financial goals. It may add up to $1500 a year, which sounds reckless to some, but if it’s not going to make a big difference in your overall finances, then I would say, keep wasting that money on coffee.

If on the other hand, you’re within arms reach of paying off your mortgage before you retire in 3 years, but you need to make a payoff plan and get to work on the extra payments now, I would say that’s a more important goal to focus on.

So the key here is to focus on what matters most. It’s easy to get distracted and to busy ourselves with things or goals that aren’t that important.

A good example of this is in living the Christian life…we are so imperfect, it can be overwhelming and not all that helpful to focus generally on not being such a wretched creature. So it’s advisable to not focus on generically being a better person, but to focus on your vices one at a time. So if you’re impatient or prideful, in order to get that vice under control and hopefully out of your life, you would focus on practicing the virtue opposite to the vice…in the case of impatience, it would obviously be patience, and in the case of pride, it would be humility. 

By picking a vice (ideally it would be your worst one), and focusing on developing the opposite virtue, you avoid the temptation to pick 10 goals and focus on them simultaneously, thus ruining any hope that you’ll actually succeed at getting your worst vice under control. 

So the goal then is to focus on the area in your life that would make the biggest difference for you if you improved. Sometimes that’s obvious, like if your up to your eyeballs in debt. But even then it may not be clear how to tackle it, since you’ll need to address the root cause of what’s led you to the debt burden in the first place. Often it’s overspending and a bad habit, but other times it could be that you didn’t have enough cash for emergencies and a surprise big expense got you into the debt mess you’re in. 

The key is focusing on what matters most when setting goals and understanding what needs to change, so you can craft a resolution that will actually improve your life over then long-run. 

That’s it for today. Thanks for listening! My name is Ashley Micciche and this is the Retirement Quick Tips podcast.  

----------

>>> Subscribe on Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2DI2LSP

>>> Subscribe on Amazon Alexa: https://amzn.to/2xRKrCs

>>> Visit the podcast page: https://truenorthra.com/podcast/ 

----------

Tags: retirement, investing, money, finance, financial planning, retirement planning, saving money, personal finance