The beginning of a year is synonymous with new resolutions to be achieved. Goals like losing weight, buying a car, learning another language, or traveling more are often the most common. However, few people consider leading a healthier financial life among their goals, as a key factor in the development stage.

Why Financial Planning Should Be a Personal Goal?

Despite this, many people do not pay attention to personal financial planning because they consider it to be a waste of time, or they tried to do it the previous year, but a few months after starting their planning, it did not work. There are certain personal development goals that you should consider as it relates to your finances. We will now dive into some of them.

Your Personal Growth

Currently, personal development consists of adopting new ideas or ways of seeing life or processing what happens in it, but also by adopting new behaviors, knowledge, or radically changing professions.

For example, if you have never created a personal budget and just living from paycheck to paycheck, you may want to change those behaviors and adopt discipline and a desire to improve your situation.

At this point, you know you have to make changes and since you already know what you want to achieve, it is time to analyze how to achieve those things.

Make a list of all the tasks and mini-tasks that you must do to achieve your goal (s), and make sure they are measurable, so you know if you are doing something right or wrong.
Write down the things you have to do to make the changes toward improving your personal finances such as purchasing financial software, a notebook, or order checkbooks from the bank where you can have a duplicate of your spending.
You could also discipline yourself to write down every expense or put it in a spreadsheet, adding it up at the end of the month to see if you have spent more than you have earned.

Staying Positive

Personal growth and development is closely linked to positive thinking. Negativity can stagnate you and will slow down your development. If you think that you are not capable, that means you won’t attempt to strive. You are not going to want to motivate yourself to change the aspects of your life with which you are not comfortable such as your personal finance.

Positive affirmations can be very helpful. However, it is of little use to say to yourself "I can improve my finances" if you don't believe it. Nor is it much use to say, "Everything is going to be fine" because if you are not doing the things to see the change, it won’t happen on its own. Nor is it appropriate to have a thought such as “Nothing is going to happen for me."

Man cutting paper that says ‘impossible’

Instead, it is very important to have a positive and realistic attitude towards life. Negative thoughts are very commonly cognitive distortions. That means irrational thoughts distort reality and cause discomfort. All of us have these kinds of thoughts at some point. However, it is important to learn to detect and neutralize them so that they do not undermine your spirit.

For this, a psychological, cognitive restructuring technique has proven to be very effective.

Take Responsibility

There are so many times that people complain about being a victim instead of making moves towards making changes and taking responsibility for their own actions, which may have caused the dilemma with their personal finances.

If you have no strategy towards personal growth, the best place to start is taking responsibility for why you are at the place you are now, in financial duress.

If you don’t take responsibility for your spending habits, and you keep spending more than you have over and over again, nothing will change.

Improve Organization Skills

Part of personal development is to improve your organization skills, so you can subsequently organize your own personal finances. Get organized, and it will show that you are a true professional and that you manage your finances well. When you work on your organizational skills, it reveals that you value time and want to be productive. It also helps you to develop discipline over time.

To improve your organizational skills means that you have to learn how to multitask and know time management.

Improve Management Skills

Within the management phase, you should be immersed in personal development goals that allow you to not only become a leader but also know how to manage your personal life and aspirations.

Management skills are capabilities that allow you to lead effectively, and they help you to achieve your goals and to help pthers achieve their goals.

Today's managerial skills go beyond organizing. As a leader, you face a highly competitive context that changes rapidly. You live in a digital and globalized world that requires a new kind of leadership and if you don't develop your leadership skills, you won't be considered a good leader and you won’t be able to reach your personal development goals.

Management skills give you the confidence to be able to manage your own personal finances; among other things in your life, whether digitally or manually.

Self-Awareness and Emotional Intelligence

Self-awareness is the foundation of emotional intelligence, and it is your ability to observe what is happening in your mind, body, and emotions. It is important to have clarity as it relates to finances and so, you should be self-aware and in tune with your emotional intelligence. It takes work and alertness to realize what happens in your environment and notice the impact that your actions have on people and on your own life.

Your self-awareness is what allows you to be aware of your strengths and opportunities for improvement. Your goal is to be able to identify the thoughts that worry, and the fears, frustrations they generate.

It will be much easier to have a good perspective to evaluate how useful your thoughts are and act in the way that you consider most effective. If you have not developed your self-awareness, you may react explosively, devastated by your worries and emotions, often damaging relationships, personal finances, and the work environment.

The typical example of the leader who when stressed because something did not go well, allows stress to dominate, and communicates from a place of frustration, transmitting the mood to their personal lives and decisions.

Self-awareness is key because it is what allows you to be resilient in times of stress.

Improve Your Ability to Save

Another way toward personal development is saving. Saving is very important for you to achieve certain goals and to be able to access a better quality of life. Although for some, it may be a difficult habit to acquire, the truth is that setting goals (for example, traveling at the end of the year, studying for a diploma, etc.) is a great incentive to save, as it keeps you motivated. In that way, you will not feel that saving is a sacrifice, but a necessity.

Open a savings account

Save as your obligations allow. No matter what your goal is, start setting aside at least 10 percent of your income and gradually build it up. Create a savings category in your budget. Reserve an amount from your budget only for unexpected situations.

Open a specific bank account for the emergency fund, having the money saved will reduce the temptation to spend it on other things. Remember to allow for these savings within your budget.

Establish a savings amount, which can function as the emergency fund for contingencies or for future situations. The financial sector offers different alternatives for savings such as savings accounts in a bank, which, depending on the nature of the account may have a specific purpose.

It could also be an investment fund, through which you can allocate resources depending on plans or purposes (education, taking a trip, starting a business, etc.)

Getting Better With Budgeting

Know the limits of your budget and try not to spend more than you can. Paying only the minimum on your cards and continuing to use them can become a never-ending story. To reduce your debt, try not to use more credit until you have paid it off completely. Within the family budget, there should always be an item for education, this expense should range between 15 and 25 percent of your income so as not to sacrifice money for food, housing, health, and transportation. One of the strategies you can use to save a little more is to agree to buy in bulk. This will help you get better prices on the items you need.

The budget will then be the difference between income (what you receive each month) and expenses (what you spend monthly).

Adjust your budget

If when you create the budget, you find that what you earn is greater than what you spend, you can allocate money to savings and even for long-term investments. However, if on the contrary, what you spend is more than what you earn, it is necessary that you review your expenses and take the necessary actions to reduce them. If it is not possible to make an individual adjustment, you can add to your income that of your partner or family unit to make the accounts more bearable.

Cut your expenses

In case you definitely cannot adjust the budget with higher income, you can opt for alternatives that allow you to reduce your expenses, such as lowering or eliminating unnecessary expenses, moving to a cheaper place, saving in the consumption of public services, among others.

In order to execute the budget, it is necessary to maintain a constant discipline in monitoring all expenses, for which it is necessary to keep daily or weekly control as much as possible, of what you buy or consume.

Be in control of your finances

By doing this exercise month by month and following each of the recommendations in a timely manner, at the end of the year you will achieve a healthy balance in your finances, a defined savings fund, and, above all, the certainty of knowing that you have learned how to spend it. This is a conscious and rational way toward personal development and realistic financial goals.

Start a Business

Consider finding new challenges such as owning a business. Having a job is essential, but what makes the difference is the increase in income. So focus on increasing your income to achieve your personal financial goals faster. Ask yourself this question, from the sources of income that you already have. How can I increase that income? If you have already finished your college studies, it does not mean that you stop learning, because every day, you will discover something new. Having a new job and even starting businesses always require current knowledge, since, if you stop learning, it means that you stop growing.

Without a doubt, many people have the main goal of putting that business idea into action, for which they have even decided to dedicate all their efforts and capital. Starting a business is a big step in a person's life. It will definitely require business budget goals if you want any chance of succeeding. However, before starting a company, the most sensible thing to do is to plan, know the audience you will be targeting and not neglect the financial aspect. Every entrepreneur who wants to turn a project into a successful company must start with the business plan, as this will help them guide themselves in each phase of the journey.

Taking Action

To achieve your personal development goals toward your finances, you have to take action. So take your goals from off the paper where you have been designing your strategy and get to work. Continued actions create a snowball effect. With each small action, you generate an even greater impact. Starting can be difficult, but it costs more time if you do nothing. Focus on starting small with actions that do not pose a barrier.

To summarize:

It is important to have a clear purpose and align your financial goals with it
Set big goals that push you, but not huge ones that scare you
Choose the project with the greatest impact on achieving your goal
Take many small actions with great impact

It is no use if you are not taking action toward your goals toward financial independence. Ask yourself what exactly you want to do with your personal finances that will improve your life. Once you determine the answer to that question, you begin with the execution of your written plan in order to achieve it. If something is not working, stop doing it, analyze the situation, create goals and take action.

Job Promotion

With the arrival of a new year, it is normal for many of us to evaluate ourselves to determine if we already have the necessary knowledge to think about the possibility of change, with new responsibilities and challenges. Therefore, it is important to know how to position yourself to be a candidate for a job promotion. This is another platform for personal development, which affects your finances.

Continuing Education

Another way toward personal development is to continue your education. For example, if you currently have an Associate Degree, you can go on to pursue a Bachelor’s Degree and then an accelerated Master’s Degree program. In so doing, you will improve your chances of increasing your income.

Most companies offer more money to applicants with higher education. If you are currently in a job and want to be taken seriously about getting a promotion, the best thing to do is to enter into a degree program. Your employer will see that as an accomplishment of a personal development goal. You will be rewarded with a promotion, just for making the effort toward improving. In doing so, your promotion will earn you a higher salary and this would be an improvement of your existing financial situation.

Conclusion

As you can see, all households are susceptible to financial planning and organization to a greater or lesser extent. In this sense, the sooner you carry out the actions described above, the better you can optimize your financial resources to achieve your proposed objectives toward personal development.

If you want to learn more about how you can improve your financial life, then you might be interested in Goalry, which is an online platform that offers information and services related to various types of finances in a store format.

This includes Wealthry, Debtry, Budgetry, Creditry and Loanry. You will find enough information to make the right choices to improve your financial status.

What Personal Development Goals Are Related to Finances?