Setting Financial Goals

I was reading another blog today which talked about financial goals. It occurred to me that I'd never really had financial goals. Heck, I've never really set goals in my life at all. I just go from one thing to the next.

My husband and I have a general financial goal of wanting to retire at the age of 55. We continue to invest despite the continuing falling market. We're hoping that this market will enable us to reach that early retirement goal. While we regularly invest in retirement accounts, I can't say that we've ever sat down and laid out a plan on how we'll get there. We simply sock away as much money into retirment as we can. Really, to the point that we've never had much money saved outside of retirement.

Well, except this year. I sat down at the beginning of the year and decided that we needed to develop an emergency fund of $10,000. I sat down and figured out where that money would come from. I've done pretty good at sticking to the plan. Of course, the plan was simply to stick our entire tax refund, bonuses and money saved from not having to pay daycare over the summer into the emergency fund.

On the other hand, I've thought about spending some of that emergency fund to help offset the cost of building an addition so that we don't need to take such a large loan.

I've also thought about other financial goals, but never written them down and developed a plan on how to achieve those goals. As a result, I think I'm going to try to sit down and develop some financial goals and a plan to achieve those goals.