63: Crafting Your Financial Strategy for 2024: A Step-by-Step Guide

In this episode of "Elevate Your Paycheck," we walk you through a comprehensive exercise to create a robust financial strategy for 2024. As we bid farewell to 2023, it's the perfect time for reflection and forward planning, not just for your financial goals but for your personal aspirations as well.

We begin by sharing our  journey of reflection over the past year, highlighting the importance of learning from the past and planning for the future. We revisit some of the significant events of 2023, from impactful interviews to engaging webinars and personal client success stories. These reflections set the stage for a deep dive into goal setting and aligning your financial objectives with your personal life goals.

Key Highlights:

1. The Importance of Reflective Planning: Understand the value of looking back at your past year to inform your future goals.
2. Creating SMART Financial Goals: Carolyn revisits the concept of SMART goals - Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound - and how to apply this to your financial planning. (Revisit Episode 4 for a detailed explanation on SMART goals).
3. Aligning Financial and Personal Goals: Learn how to ensure that your financial goals support and are integrated with your broader life aspirations.
4. The Power of Why: Discover the significance of understanding the 'why' behind your goals to maintain motivation and focus.
5. Quarterly Goal Setting: Carolyn introduces a practical approach to goal setting by breaking down the year into manageable quarters, making it easier to track progress and stay on course.
6. Visual Gratification and Habit Tracking: Explore fun and effective methods like Bingo for goal tracking and the use of habit trackers for daily progress monitoring.
7. The Role of Accountability: Learn how having an accountability partner can significantly boost your chances of achieving your goals.

Additionally, Carolyn offers valuable toolkit, including a worksheet on SMART goals and a personal habit tracker available on thefinancialmoment.com/smartgoals.

This episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to step into 2024 with a clear, achievable financial plan. Whether you’re aiming for personal growth, financial stability, or both, Carolyn’s guidance provides a solid foundation to start your year right.

Questions for Reflection:

1. What were my major financial achievements in the past year?
2. Where did I encounter financial challenges, and what strategies helped me overcome them?
3. Did I stick to my budget, and were there any unexpected expenses that I can plan for in the future?
4. What did I learn from my spending habits, and where can I make adjustments to save more or spend wisely?
5. Did I make progress towards my savings goals, and how can I enhance my saving strategies?
6. How can I improve my financial literacy and make more informed decisions in the future?
7. What are my long-term financial goals, and how did my actions align with these goals in the past year?
8. Did I prioritize building an emergency fund, and how can I strengthen my financial safe

Join the The Financial Moment community on:
Instagram
Facebook
Website
Email: info@thefinancialmoment.com

Grab this FREE guide with 10 easy tips to keep your budget on track!

Submit guest suggestions HERE

Transcript

Carolyn: 0:00

You're listening to Elevate your Paycheck, the podcast that is dedicated to transforming your financial journey. I'm Carolyn, your host and money coach that will guide you out of that paycheck to paycheck cycle and onto a path towards financial independence. Are you ready? Let's do this. Hello, and welcome back to the show. Can you guys believe that we are in the final days of 2023? Like, where did the time go? I hope you've had a wonderful holiday and some time off to spend with family and friends and a little bit of a chance to reflect on how this year has penned out for you financially.

Carolyn: 0:48

One of the things that I've talked about, probably in the past year on the show was the importance of planning and reflecting on the past in order to learn from it so that you don't make future mistakes. The end of the year is the perfect time to do this type of reflection and planning, so I thought I'd walk you through an exercise to create a strategy for 2024. Now you can use this for your personal goals. You can use this for your financial goals. Maybe it'll comply to anything. Now, how many of you over the holidays did that last minute running around to find the final things that you needed? Now, if your hand is raised, then you're in company of a lot of people, including myself, so it doesn't really matter how much you plan. There's always something that you forget or you just didn't include in your list, but you know what. That's okay. It's okay to deviate a little bit from your plan, because life is like that. It's going to throw us unexpected turns and twists, but having that foresight as to the direction you want to go is really critical when you are talking about creating financial goals and reaching them. So, to start this process and again to get your mind going, I just pull out my calendar.

Carolyn: 2:15

I went straight back to January 2023 and I started to look at some of the events that happened. So, as I was looking, I remembered some of the great interviews that we had on the show. I remembered the savings challenge that we ran I think it was in February. I also worked with some fantastic clients who got great results, and so that was enjoyable to see the different appointments I had booked throughout the year and to remember the progress that they made and all of the webinars. There were so many webinars on different topics, and I remember the feeling of coming online and watching the people join in the events and some were really packed with. I think the most this year was maybe like 50 people online to really small ones, where there was just a handful like 10 or so people, and just the engaging questions that they had and the feedback that you get from after you've done the presentation, and it really gave me a sense of accomplishment. And then there were the in-person presentations. That was a whole other level. I enjoy talking to people directly and really getting into their personal situation, and so the in-person presentations were quite different than a webinar, because in a webinar I'm just talking on and on and on, but in person people stopped and asked questions in between and it's really interactive, and so I really appreciated that as well.

Carolyn: 3:45

And then this year for the first time, I decided to have a quote unquote retreat, and right now I'm a team of one, so it was just me. There was really a time just to reflect and again to plan out what I wanted to do in the following months. And then it was financial literacy month. That was the most insane month for the financial moment. But again I got to meet some great people, do a lot of presentations, met new clients. It was really just a whirlwind. So, reflecting on all of that, I kind of put it in a column like needs improvement or done really well, and I just kind of fleshed out where I could make improvements on each one of those items, where I could possibly take something that went really well and duplicate that somewhere else. And that's kind of the idea of this brain dump right, just to get your ideas flowing so that you can really assess and see what are the good things and what are the things that need a little bit of work.

Carolyn: 4:54

So once you're done all of the reflective type work, you're going to head in to create some new financial goals. This is where you can think about what it is that you want to achieve, whether that be more free time with your family, aka vacation or perhaps starting a new business or changing jobs or saving for your retirement. You know there's so many different things that people prioritize and what we need to do is really create some realistic, achievable goals. And these goals need to be measurable, right? Because what we're going to do is we're going to take them and break them into little chunks, but more on that in a minute. So if you want more information on how to set up what we call a smart goal.

Carolyn: 5:46

Head way back to episode number four, and I did a whole thing on how to create a smart goal. But what a smart goal means is it is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound right, so you want your goal to include all of those components, because in order to do that, you're creating baby steps to get to the master goal. So head to episode four and you'll get a lot more information on what a smart goal is. But once you got that down, then that's the second part of this process. Okay, so for step number three, we're going to integrate those financial goals with your life goals, right? So this is where I said this process works for personal as well as your financial goals.

Carolyn: 6:39

So what we want to do is ensure that what your aspirations are for your personal self are tying into your financial goals, because, let's face it right, most of things that we want in life revolve around money. You know, even if we want to get in shape, you may need a gym membership, you may need some fitness equipment. You know, everything we do kind of is ties back to how much money that we really have. Right, we want to provide a good life for our children that means buying a house or, you know, sending them to school, and so everything is kind of interrelated, and we want to make sure that your financial goals are aligned with your broader life goals. So, after you've got your financial goals listed, go ahead and list your life goals and let's see if they line up exactly. And if they don't or you have something that's very unrealistic, like, say, let's go on a vacation four times a year, but your budget really doesn't allow for that then there's a mismatch there, right? So either you need to boost your income in order to attain that goal or you need to make an adjustment to the goal itself. So this is where I mean, but by being aligned and then this part is probably the most important.

Carolyn: 7:53

What you wanna do is, for each goal that you have that is aligned with your life goal, say why it is important to you, why do you really want this more than anything? Because that is the driver that's going to force you to kind of stick to what's required when you really don't want to. So let's take the example of a fitness goal. So this is a personal goal, not a financial goal, and we say that we wanna work out five days a week. And the purpose of that, the why behind it, is so that you can live a healthy lifestyle, so that you can spend more time with your kids, have more energy. Perhaps it even ties into eating healthy. So these are the whys behind a, why you want to be healthy or be fit, because they're going to be some days that you're not going to want to work out. Right, can I get an amen? Ha ha ha. When it's pitch black outside and you have to get up and put on your coat and it's blizzarding out and you have to go to the gym, you're not gonna wanna go.

Carolyn: 8:58

And what I want you to reflect on is your why. Why are you doing this? Why do you want to get in shape? And the same applies to your money situation. Right, there are going to be times when you just wanna spend some money. Right, you just wanna go out there and shop and buy miscellaneous things or scroll on Amazon and put it in your cart and check out and have it show up at your door the next day. And before you make that purchase, you gotta think. You know what am I doing? Why am I saving? Why am I putting myself through this restrictive kind of behavior and it's because you have a greater goal. Right, you have a greater goal. You wanna take that vacation, you wanna change jobs. This is the things that we have to think about when we just wanna go against the grain.

Carolyn: 9:47

All right, so we have done our reflection, we've created some goals, we made sure that it aligns to our life goals and we've determined why it's important to us. So now here's the fun part we need some visual gratification For us. As humans. We really get enjoyment out of seeing something complete Start to finish, right. And so if the goal is too far out there or it's too vague, then it becomes very difficult to kind of stick to the habits that are required. So the key to all of this is really not to map out 2024. I know that's strange, because most people are saying set up your whole year and make sure you have it all planned out, and I'm saying you know what? Let's take it in smaller chunks and let's do it by quarter. So every three months we create these goals and we create some habits that are gonna be associated with those goals. So, again in my fitness example, right, working out five days a week is gonna get me closer to being fit, but you know, maybe I need to change it up, maybe I need to do some cardio and some weight training and do some weightlifting or whatever. It is right, you need to do different things in order to get that fitness goal, and so you're gonna build some habits around that.

Carolyn: 11:15

When it comes to your money situation, you have to look at your expenses and see, okay, where can I kind of cut. It may not be something that you wanted to do right now, but it's something that's needed in order to get towards your goal right, and so taking it at a three month increment is much easier to manage than thinking of that. You know I have to cut this item for an entire year, so what you can do is, if you're doing this on paper, you can just cut the paper into four pieces and you have January, february, march, april, may, june, july, august, september, october, november, december, and you're going to create your goals for this small three month period and chunk of time. A fun exercise that I've seen people do is actually to create bingo, so you can find on the internet, you know, a bingo template, and what you do is, for each item that you've completed within your three month period, you can check it off or exit off, and when you get bingo, which means you've checked off five or whatever across or diagonally, you then can reward yourself with a small reward, and again, it doesn't have to be monetary, it can be anything. We've gone through that before but having a list of things that you enjoy can be your monetary reward for hitting all the markers. So that's kind of a fun way to get that visual gratification.

Carolyn: 12:47

And of course, another way is to just record it on a spreadsheet. So of course that's what I did. I have a huge habit tracker and I can just check off each day that I've completed the particular habit, and it actually tells me how much percentage I can get to more than my goal. So I guess I'm just a numbers girl, but I find that fun as well, okay, and so now here is a bonus tip. So you have personally created these lists, you have trackers, you have incentives, you have a visual kind of laid out plan, but you're doing it alone, and the bonus in this is if you can create an accountability partner to do these with, to support you in achieving those goals, it is going to be so much easier, right, so, whether that be your spouse, whether that be your BFF, your parent, your child, even like you know just someone that can hold you accountable for the things that you want to do. And, of course, you know a coach. You know what's better than a coach to push you along right. So just getting that accountability is really important and it'll actually exponentially help you to reach that goal a lot faster. And that's the process.

Carolyn: 14:08

So, if you're going to take on this exercise, you know, find a time where you are in a comfortable space maybe it's your favorite coffee shop, maybe it's just getting up early before all your family does. Just give yourself a little bit of time to do this. And, of course, I have some tools to help you along in this process. So if you head to thefinancialmomentcom backslash smart goals S M A R T GO A L S you're going to have access to my live training, a video training of me describing what a smart goal is and how to create one. You're going to get a worksheet that you can actually fill in and complete, with all the definitions and everything that you need to include, and then, finally, I've also included my own personal habit tracker and it's Google sheet, and you can just make a copy of it. It becomes yours and it is a daily tracker where you can just check off everything that you want to do to get incrementally closer and closer to your goals. So I hope that's super helpful for you guys.

Carolyn: 15:19

Oh, I also wanted to leave you with some questions that are going to help you in your reflective time. Maybe there are things that you might not have thought about, and so I'm just going to read them through now, and I will also include them in the show notes just to make it easier for you if you'd like to print them out. So here we go.

Carolyn: 15:38

Number one what were my major financial achievements in the past year?

Carolyn: 15:45

Number two where did I encounter financial challenges and what strategies helped me to overcome them? Number three did I stick to my budget and were there any unexpected expenses that I didn't plan for? Number four what did you learn from your spending habits and where can you make adjustments to save more or spend more wisely? Number five did I make progress towards my savings goals and how can I enhance my savings strategies? Number six how can I improve my financial literacy and make more informed decisions in the future? And number seven what are my long term financial goals and how did my actions align with these goals over the past year? And then finally, number eight did I prioritize building an emergency savings fund and how can I strengthen that financial safety net? And there you have it. That is your complete plan on how to develop a strategy for 2024 that you're going to implement in three month increments. And remember to head to thefinancialmomentcom backslash smart goals and you're going to get all the resources that I use personally to make this happen. So I hope you have a wonderful new year, happy 2024 and we will see you on the other side, take care.

Carolyn: 17:29

Thanks for listening to the elevate your paycheck podcast. If you love this episode and need deeper support, head to thefinancialmomentcom backslash support to see how we can support you, no matter where you are at today. We help our clients organize their finances, create savings, eliminate debt and create a roadmap to their financial goals, which makes them more in control than they ever dreamed possible. So head to thefinancialmomentcom backslash support and make this the next step in your financial journey.