Dreams into Reality, Day 7

Dave Ramsey has a talk on his Facebook site where you can get his version of turning Dreams into vision then goals and achieving them. Having been a long range planner, I took a slightly broader approach to this and talked about goals in three areas. First there are short term. If you can do them this year, they are short term. Perhaps you might even slip some of these into the next year but within one year is my version. The next term is mid range, those things that will take from two to four years. the long range goals are more four years.

As an example of short term goal is to join weight watchers and lose 10 pounds. Another might be to really get a handle of what your expenditures are.

Mid term goals might be to change your wardrobe as you replace it. Save for a used car as the old one wears out. Try to cash flow home improvements a room at a time.

Long term goals must be something that you look at at least annually and might include where you live, where you you want to live when you retire, and a retirement finance plan with investment.

OK, now that you know what terms you need to apply your goals to, lets cover Dave's info quickly. 7 Areas for Goals; Financial, Intellectual, Family, Spiritual, Physical, career and social. I would have short term, mid term and long term goals in each of these areas.

His five things to do when making your dreams turn in to reality are: Make your goals specific. Make your goals measurable, Make sure they are your goals and you buy into them. Set time limits and best of all, write them down. This process is best done as a family so everyone understands where you are and where you are going. It is easier to say, when we get a yard, we can get a dog and put that on the timeline.

If you were a business, what you can fund this year is generally called a program for that year. You can lift and shift but it really helps is everyone has a share of the goals by term and can all at least aim for the end prize.

I call this entire process team building and family building if done at home. I think that having an understanding of what the family goals are is a key to long term happiness. It takes time to do all this and that time will be with the people that are the most important to you. Very early in our dating I saw that barb had a great plan for her life and I couldn't help but love her more for it. She was going to be a teacher (Done), get married (done), have children (done), buy a house (done and done) and retire well off enough to travel. A lot of people look at life as a series of days strung together that you live and don't try to understand that without working on achievement of goals, your dreams are just that.

By the Way, Dave says that the three biggest resolutions for the new year are to get out of debt, stop smoking and lose weight.

MUD