My Goals

Finally, after thinking about this for a little while, I remembered that I'd had goals already set for my financial future. These goals were several years old, so I thought I'd dust them off, revise them, and put them out here. My primary goal was a Net Worth of $1,000,000 by the time I was 35. Given the past couple of years of financial turmoil, I've revised that goal to be a Net Worth of $1,000,000 by the time I'm 40. Right now, I'm 26, so that's 14 years to sock away a million clams.

To go along with that, I plan on being debt free (except the 'secured' loans, like the mortgage and maybe a car payment), by the age of 30, which is about 3 and 1/2 years. I'll also shoot for what's a-likely-to-be-even-more-difficult savings rate of 20% of our Gross Income. By the time my spouse is working, that should be an incredibly high $24,000 per year. Even with this high of a savings rate, and if we were at debt-zero already, we'd still be short by $125,000 (assuming a 12% return). Not to worry though, if we carry that plan through until we're almost 90, we'll have about $78,000,000. Plenty to leave behind for our great grandchildren!

I won't revise my goal to a more 'practical' number, there's just no fun in that. If I set the goal to a soft $250,000, where's the motivation? We could achieve that in less than 10 years with less than half the investment. By setting my goal higher than what I can presently achieve, I'm hoping to motivate myself into finding different streams of income (and saving that income).

As I'm proofreading this, I realize that I'm using the word 'I' almost exclusively for the goals that are outlined above. I think this comes back to the fact that neither she nor I communicate well when it comes to money. We'll see what my wife puts out here for her goals, and then we will come up with a common set to work from.