Systems > Goals

Hi everyone!
You made it through the cold and depressing January! Here’s to a fantastic February.
I chose not to write about goals in January because goals are completely pointless! Well, that is an exaggeration, but the importance of goals can be overstated. 
Why? When you make a goal, but don’t have a plan for reaching that goal, the inevitable result is failure to reach the goal. This is repeated time and time again, year after year. You might even have a few personal examples.
Therefore, the most important thing to focus on is a clear and actionable plan, or as I like to call it, a system. 
James Clear, author of Atomic Habits (which is an incredible book), says it perfectly: “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
Having a goal isn’t enough. It might motivate you for a bit, but unless you apply underlying systems to help you achieve the goal, eventually you will fall short.
Here is an example: Don’t make a goal of reading a book every month. Schedule a 30 minute reading time into your day. The goal, although honorable, is doomed to fail without a system to complete the goal.
Let’s try this concept with money:

• Goal: Do a better job at knowing where my money is going
  
• System: Schedule a 30 minute monthly meeting (either individually or with a partner) to go over your monthly spending. Check your bank accounts, credit card statements, Venmo history, etc. This will help you understand your spending habits and make decisions on how you want to adjust going forward. Consider doing this with a bottle of wine and NO judgement.
  
• Goal: Invest more
  
• System: Decide on your monthly contribution to a retirement account (I love Roth IRA’s). Next, enable automatic contribution AND automatic investing. The automatic contribution will get the money to the account, the automatic investing will make it purchase the investment (index funds are my favorite investments). Enabling automatic contributions and investments takes your brain out of it. You don’t have to remember anything, it just happens! No mental load for you!
  
• Goal: Pay off credit card balance
  
• System: Pay an additional 10% per month on the balance of the credit card debt. Consider ways to save that money, like limiting your eating out to twice per week, or how to earn that money, such as selling two unused household items per month.
  

Goals are not pointless like I said before. They can help us identify an area we want to focus on. But from there, you need to create a system in order to be successful. 
Suggestion, don’t try to change everything all at once. Choose something and focus on that for a while. When it becomes normal, move onto your next priority.
What money system are you going to put into place this year? I would love to hear about it!