Whether we’re talking about eliminating our debt or building up of our savings, there’s one thing that’s crucial to that success, and that is to have at least one long term goal in place, and hopefully more.

Of course you can have more than one long-term goal because you can have personal goals, financial goals, professional goals, family goals, etc.

The reason why you should and must have a long term goal in place is because when you’re looking at putting away savings and building up wealth, along with eliminating your debt, there is always short-term pain involved, which if you don’t deal with, will cause you to quit very easily and revert back to past practices which have led you to where you’re at now, with debt overload and no ability to put away money for the future.

In other words, there’s a lot of psychology involved with defeating your debt and having healthy finances, and a key to successfully navigating those waters is to have long term goals in place which you can use as inspiration and guidelines for the reason you’re deferring gratification till a later date.

Almost everyone that doesn’t do this is destined to fail in their financial efforts, as there is very little motivation to take care of things today if you have no hope for tomorrow.

What we must all do in reference to debt is immediately eliminate our bad spending habits in order to begin a program which will give us hope of victory and eventual release from the huge debt burden we carry.

That requires the setting of long term goals which will be what you continually remind yourself concerning as to why you’re experiencing short-term pain. As athletes have said in the past: no pain, no gain. And that’s true. But the other element involved is they definitely have a goal and purpose as to why they’re training and what they’re shooting for.

No athlete goes through the training because they just love to train or for the sake of training itself. Athletes go through the rigorous training they do because they have a personal or team goal of becoming excellent and a top competitor in the sport they’re involved in.

That’s just another way of saying they have a long term goal. You get the point.

There is no way you can endure deferred gratification if you don’t have specific goals set before you which motivate you to endure the pain of paying down debt and to quit spending on things you think you ‘must’ have, but in reality usually buy because you saw or heard someone else having it and decided right away that you do too.

Paying down debt or putting away money for savings means that the money set aside can’t be used for purposes you would prefer. That’s the pain aspect of it. The long term gain is you will eventually be able to buy or do whatever you want once you’re free from the burden of heavy debt, and when you buy things at that time it’ll be a positive experience as you won’t be thinking in terms of how you’re going to pay for it going forward.

If you want to successfully save money and build up your wealth, there are things you won’t be able to do that others who are increasing their debt will be able to, although at eventual and extreme burden to themselves as the bills eventually mount up to the point of no return, as many have recently.

The key is to neglect what appears to be affluence, but in reality is someone in debt over their heads who are building that appearance at the risk of losing everything.

Set yourself some long term goals which can help you discipline yourself and keep in mind why you’re going through some short-term pain. You’ll eventually be thankful you’ve taken these steps and will enjoy the lifestyle you want without the concern you’re one job loss away from losing everything.

Tags: budgeting, debt, savings goals

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 28th, 2010 at 7:00 am and is filed under tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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