How To
Achieve Your Financial Goals

Welcome to the Financial Goals page. This web site is about setting and achieving personal goals. To see more goals articles please go to our achieve your personal goals or setting goals pages.

Certainly one of my goals is to achieve financial freedom. To me, that means having sufficient income from investments that I no longer need to work to pay for my desired lifestyle. From what I read, many people would like that. So how can it be achieved?

One way is to win the lottery (though having a million in the bank is no good unless you know how to manage your personal finances). Or maybe you can inherit wealth from a rich relation.

But what else can you do? Is there a success formula you can follow?

I've read many books on this question and I recommend my top choices below. Also, I'm a qualified accountant (CPA) and so I've had the opportunity to speak with many people about their finances over the years. So, here is my view about how best to set about achieving your personal financial goals.

First, you need to save money regularly. In our consumerist Western culture, there is a strong pattern of buying 'luxury items' on credit. By luxury items I mean anything we don't really need for our survival - like cars, televisions, holidays and so on.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for buying luxury items. However, I prefer not to buy these on credit as otherwise a large part of your income can be taken up repaying consumer debt.

Second, you need to invest the money that you've saved into investments which will bring you a cash flow income, or perhaps a profit on sale. Personally, I've invested in property and businesses but other choices might be stocks or commodities. It's good to educate yourself about the choices and particulary the type of assets in which you decide to invest.

I recommend that you take a look at these two books as they put into simple language the seemingly complicated subject of achieving your financial goals.

The Richest Man In Babylon is a collection of short stories which illustrate the importance of putting money aside to save and to repay debt.

Rich Dad Poor Dad explains the importance of managing your personal finances and building cash flow assets. This link also gives you information about the financial education games created by Robert Kiyosaki.

Also here are some links to money goal setting web sites which provide information on managing your personal finances.

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