The Smart Way to Set Your Income Goals
The funny thing about bank accounts is that they don’t fill up. They could always use a bit more money. To that end, most people set income goals for the year. You can’t just pull a number out of the air though. You need to be intentional with your goal and it starts by defining what your enough is.
What is Enough
For everyone there is a point where more money doesn’t get more of anything that you truly value.
This is the first key step because it’s so easy to just keep chasing after the elusive ‘more’ under the thought that you’ll know when you’ve got enough income. You won’t know, you’ll keep spending more and be consistently short on funds.
For some enough will be the ability to be home with their kids by the time they finish school every day. Others will want to travel for a month at a time every year.
A great exercise to find what enough means to you is to write down the top 4 areas in your life and what they should look like in 5 years. As you build your business and look at new opportunities filter them through those 4 areas of your life to make sure that they fit in with what your ideal is.
What Debts Do You Have?
One thing that may break your idea of enough to start is any debt you have. While you may be able to earn enough to live working less don’t do it if you have any debt outside a mortgage. You should be living like no one else today (working hard) so that you can live like no one else later (not working so hard).
The best way to pay off your debts is to find the smallest one and pay it off. Once you get your smallest debt paid off move on to the next smallest debt combining the minimum payment you’re already making with anything extra plus the payment from the first small debt. Continuing like this you will continue to build up your payments so that by the time you’re at the huge student loan you’re managing a rather large drop in that bucket. On top of the larger drop you’ve also lots of positive reinforcement paying off other debts so staying the course on the big one is much easier.
Break The Goals Down
Setting an income goal at the beginning of the year is only the first step in the process of actually achieving the goal. If you want to earn $120k this year what does that break down to each month?
Secret to Getting Absolute Clarity
How many leads or hours do you need in a month to make $12k a month to get you to your goal for the year? Far to many people put out the goal for the year and then never look at it again. For some weird reason they figure they can hit it without a plan and without checking in on it regularly.
Don’t be that person. Put together a plan for reaching your income goals for the year. Then break it down to monthly and weekly goals. With that in place you are much more
