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What's up everybody and welcome to the personal finance podcast. I'm your host Andrew founder of master money dot co and today on the personal finance podcast, we're going to dive into how to win with your money goals in 2020.
If you guys have any questions, make sure you hit us up on the Master Money newsletter by going to mastermoney.co slash newsletter. And don't forget to follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcast, YouTube, or your favorite podcast player. And you can follow along with this episode on YouTube. If you just type in Andrew Giancola, my name, it will pop up there. And don't forget to leave a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. So we have a big announcement.
And we are going to be launching a free webinar designed to help you take control of your finances and actually master your money goals. And this webinar is going to be on January 6, 2025. It's going to be completely free. I want to see you guys there. We're going to actually talk through how to set meaningful financial goals. We're going to talk through how to break down these goals into actionable steps. We're going to teach you how to plan your week effectively and talk through how to actually take those goals and
put them into your planning process for your week. And the big thing about goals, you need a system in place. And this is going to be teaching you how to implement a system and what are some of the things that you can do. Because my entire goal for all of you at the end of that webinar is for you to enter that webinar with some of your financial goals.
have clarity on those goals, make sure that you have a plan in place for those goals and exit being able to accomplish anything you want in 2025. So join us for this free webinar Tuesday, January 6. It's going to be at 8 o'clock p.m. Eastern. This is our first webinar we've actually done. One of the big goals for 2025 for me is to kind of give back more to you guys and be able to communicate with you more. And so you can actually ask me questions. There's going to be a Q&A at the end. And so we'll be able to talk through a bunch of different things.
Master your money goals webinar is going to be. Again, Tuesday, January 6, 2025 at 8 p.m. Make sure you check it out. I'm going to link it up down below. So this may sound familiar, but every year you tell yourself, this is the year you're going to get your financial life together. And every single year you do it for a few weeks, or maybe even a few months, then something comes up, derails your progress, and you quit.
This is a tale that is as old as time. It happens over and over again to so many people. Maybe you start your budget, then you mess up some sort of category, and you decide that you are terrible at budgeting, and then you ditch it. Or maybe you start saving, and your car breaks down in January, and you drained all your savings, and you're all your hard work, and you feel like this is hopeless, this does not work.
Or maybe you start to get ahead and then all of a sudden you feel like, hey, my spouse is not on the same page as me and they just keep spending way too much money and drain your savings and investments and you're like, why am I even doing this? Why am I even trying to pursue some of these financial goals? And this is what happens to most people. They can't get out of their own way.
They set arbitrary goals with zero plan whatsoever to actually accomplish those goals. And guess what? Doing the same thing over and over and over again and expecting some sort of different result is like the saying goes, it's honestly insane. You can't do it. You can't expect a new outcome by doing the same stuff.
So today I'm going to lay out a plan. And this is literally how you can achieve your goals step by step, not the goals this month or this quarter or even year, but your dream goals that are way far out. And we're going to do this by planning in chunks. We're going to talk through this in a systematic way so that you understand how to plan out your goals in very specific chunks. And we're going to take action consistently. We're going to show you how to become very consistent with your goals so that you can actually achieve those goals, the only way.
To achieve goals is to actually stick with them. Consistency is to key to that. And there is a very specific way that you can stay consistent when you do this. So this is the year that it happens. You're going to get that raise. You're going to invest in your future. You actually know where your money is going and it's not just flowing out of your accounts and you have no idea what's happening.
You can finally take that dream vacation, you can finally say for that dream car, this my friends is the year. That is what I want for each and every single one of you. Because this is something that I believe anybody in this world can accomplish anything with their money. They just have to know how to plan for it. They just have to know how to plan for it with
the execution added in. And so today we're going to be giving you kind of the bird's eye view of how to go through this process. And we're going to go into more details in that webinar on the sixth. So really, really excited for this for you to get in there, buckle up. Your life is going to change during this podcast. I'm really excited. Let's get into it.
All right, first of all, you need to get clarity. Now, clarity is one of the most important things when it comes to your goals. What a lot of people do is they go and they write down their goals, and then they hardly ever look at it again, and they're not really even clear why they have this as their goal, and they don't really have a plan in place to accomplish it.
So first, I want you to think through this. Maybe take out a piece of paper you're listening. If you're driving, you're gonna do this when you get home, take out your computer or your iPad with your Apple pencil, and we're gonna write down a couple answers to questions. Number one, what is your why? If you don't know the specific reason why you're doing something, you will absolutely never do it. Psychology is very simple when it comes to this. If you don't have a why, if there's not a specific purpose for what your intentions are, you will never accomplish that goal.
Goals are meant to have very specific intentions. They have very specific numbers backing them. They have timelines when they're going to be accomplished. And you need to know what that specific intention is. Now, if you're planning with someone else, maybe you're planning with a spouse and you're putting your money goals together, you also need to understand their intentions. We need to merge these two to craft a plan that actually makes sense for both of you. So you both have to communicate on your financial goals if you are married. You are a team. And so you got to make sure that you're communicating on some of those financial goals.
Next question, how do you define success with this goal? Meaning, what does it look like for this goal to be successful? If you were a person that accomplished that goal, what would it look like for that person accomplished that goal? Say, for example, you wrote down, I want to get really fit this year. What would that look like? Is that a six pack abs? Is that running a six minute mile? Is that dead lifting 400 pounds? What is that role? What does that look like? What does success look like? How do I define this?
And then the last question is what are my five year, three year and one year goals? So getting very specific about these goals allows you to figure out what your outcome is and what's going to make sense for you. So defining these things is really important upfront is asking yourself those four questions. This is going to help you get clarity when it comes to these goals. Now you may not even know what the specific goal is. You may be thinking to yourself, well, I want to save a little more money. I want to make sure I max out my Roth IRA. I want to get that emergency fund going.
But we need to kind of get clarity on what we want out of life. So say for example, you're talking to yourself and you're saying, man, what I really want is financial freedom. That is my ultimate goal. That is my 10, 15, 20 year goal. That is my five year goal. I want financial freedom. I want to be free. That's your why.
is you want that financial freedom and then you talk to your spouse or you talk to somebody else that you're planning with or if you're single, you're just doing this on your own and you're saying to yourself, my goal is to be free. What is your goal? And they give you their goal and for the most part, most people want to be financially free and so you're going to have the same goal and you're going to come up with this.
How do you define success though? Because the question then becomes, if I want to become financially free, what does that mean? Do I want to become financially free tomorrow? Well, sure, we all want to become financially free tomorrow, but how can I actually do this in a successful way? Is it in 10 years? Am I going to get really aggressive with my savings rate? And I want to hit that goal in 10 years, you have to define what that success is. And then you have to know what your intentions are over the course of the next couple of years.
Now, number two is we're gonna set very specific goals here. Now, if you're one of our students and master your money goals, which master your money goals is our course that teaches you how to set money goals, and we do this in a very specific way and master your money goals, but what you should be doing is setting smart goals. Now, if you've never heard of smart goals, it stands for specific,
measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. And all five of these components are what is going to make you successful with the goal. Now, these smart goals have been around for a very long time, and they are something that most people do not do correctly. So let's go in the first one, which is specific. Specific means that these goals are detailed in every single way.
You state what you want the outcome to be and when you will get there. So I want you to be as specific as possible with your goal. So let me give you a great example. Last year, one of my goals was to beef up my emergency fund another six months. I wanted some additional timeline on my emergency fund.
The reason for this is we had a lot of different life things that were happening over the course of the year, and we wanted to make sure that I extended my emergency fund out. For one of the big examples is that we had our third child and with three kids, each kid that comes along, I want to make sure I have more cash cushions for whichever can come up in life, okay? So we started to increase our emergency fund, but I said to myself, no, I want to increase it by six months,
by December of 2024. So we set up that goal and we got very specific on every detail of that goal. How much are we going to save per week? How much are we going to say by weekly? How much are we going to save monthly? What is our goal for each of those different things? How much does this actually mean per day if I wanted to save per day just to show how easy this could be over time? So we got very specific on that.
Next is measurable. How do you measure success? Write it down. You gotta write down what success looks like. So when I first started budgeting, for example, one thing that I wanted was to get three months cushion in my budget. So when I was budgeting line by line, I used to use YNAB back then.
And I was line by line just looking at my budget. I was like, I want to get to a three month cushion. And I don't know how to measure this. So first, let's try to get to a one month cushion in the first 12 weeks. Now back then I wasn't making much money. So 12 weeks was a very lofty goal for me to get to a one month cushion. And so because of this, I started out with that goal and we started to save a certain amount of money every single week until I actually achieved that goal in the first 12 weeks. And all of a sudden I said to myself, wow.
This stuff actually works if you focus on it and you take action towards it. Then we got to three months within the next couple of months and we achieved that goal within that year to make sure we had a plan in place to achieve that goal, which is three achievable. This goal has to be achievable. Now, if you say you want to be a millionaire in 12 months and you're starting from zero, that's most likely not an achievable goal for 99% of people.
Instead, you want to work backwards to set this up in a way that makes sense. So achievable to me is something that you can actually accomplish over the course of 12 months, but it's going to make you slightly uncomfortable. It's going to make you have a little discomfort in how you're going to do this. It's going to make you have to work a little harder than you're used to achieve this goal.
you're going to have to push. It's not too easy where you can accomplish this goal at any point in time. So for example, if you make $100,000 a year and your goal is to save $1,000 in 12 months, that's way too easy. But also, if you make $100,000 a year and your goal is to save $90,000 over the course of the year, that's too hard. You got to figure out what is actually achievable and what makes you slightly uncomfortable. The next one is relevant.
And relevant means that you need to have a meaningful goal that aligns with your big picture plan. So if your big picture plan is financial freedom and your goal is to invest in four bars of gold over the course of the next year, most likely that gold is not going to get you to financial freedom.
product that's just a means of storage. But it is not something that's going to get you to financial freedom. So those two goals don't align. It has to be relevant to what your big picture goal is. If it's financial freedom, then looking to buy more assets that are going to increase your chances of being free sooner. Things like real estate or stocks would be a great goal to have. But looking at different assets that would not do that would not fit your larger plan.
And then lastly is time bound. For me, this is the most important part is having a time bound goal, because if there is not a time that shows when this goal would be successful, you will never get it done. You will never pursue this goal in ensure that you are going to get this done. Instead, you're going to extend that goal out and you're going to keep pushing it back over and over and over again.
If you don't have a time-bound goal, and I mean I'm staying really disciplined with this time-bound goal, I'm making sure that I accomplish it by this date or do whatever I can and give it my all to accomplish it by this date, that is what the key is here. And so having a time-bound goal is going to be very, very important. Now in Master Your Money Goals, we have very specific time-bound goals.
that we talked through. And it is something I think everybody needs to figure out what works for them. So for me last year, again, if I wanted to make sure that I added a six month cushion to my emergency fund, then I need to make sure I'm going to do this by December 2024. I listed out the exact date that I wanted to do it by and I accomplished it. I actually accomplished it way early. And so if that's something that you have or you want to read a book per week, for example,
Well, every seven days you're going to need to read an entire book. And so you have to develop a plan on how you're going to do that. And that's your time-bound goal on a weekly basis. Then on a monthly basis, it's four books. Then on a quarterly basis, it's 12 or 13 books. And so you're going to see these time-bound goals really keep you accountable because there's no other way to keep yourself accountable unless you put a time on there. It's very, very important to have that in place. We're going to jump to number three, next.
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All right, so next what we're gonna do is create the plan because now we have our goals in place. We set up our smart goals and we have all of these different things that we put together. Now we need to create a plan. And what the plan is, is what are you gonna do and when are you gonna do it? That's what we're trying to answer when we create this plan. So how many times have you made a goal? And when you made that goal, you're full of hope and excitement, but it stopped short because you did not have a clear plan.
Just writing down your goals is enough where you will see there's a lot of stats out there that say, hey, you are 60% more likely to achieve a goal if you actually write it down, which is absolutely true. But writing down your goals is not enough. You need to actually develop a plan that will take you from where you are to where you want to go.
So what we do is we break it down into actionable steps and don't let the size of your dream intimidate you. Remember success is a natural result of consistent small actions. And how do we take those actions? We do this by working in reverse. So working in reverse is one of my favorite things when it comes to setting goals because it shows us how to actually take daily actions on what we are going to do. So let's bring the example back of reading a book every single week.
And let's say you want to read a book every week. That's 52 books a year, which is an incredible goal. That's one of my favorite goals. I do it every single year is try to read one book per week. And to get there, we have to break it down into manageable pieces. So first we're going to start right away. We're going to start today and how many pages will we read? Well, what we're going to do is we're going to actually shift that every single week, depending on what book we are reading.
If you're watching on YouTube, I'll pull one out right now. This is the book Traction. And what I would do is if I wanted to read one book every single week, I would open up this book and I would go look at how many pages are in this book. And so for Traction, how many pages we got?
We have 220 pages inside of traction. Okay. So now I know how many pages are in traction. And then what I would do is I would take the page numbers and pull out my old trusty calculator. And I would say, what is 220 divided by seven? Because they're seven days in a week. And so we're going to take 220 divided by seven. That's 31.4 pages per day. I need to read from traction. So 32 pages per day from traction.
Maybe you only want to read six days per week. You want to take Sunday off, or you know Saturday, you go out with your friends, and you go hang out, so you're probably not going to read that day. So you divide it by six, or you only want to read Monday through Friday, you divide it by five, or you only want to read Monday through Thursday because you don't like doing that extra stuff on the weekend. So Monday through Thursday, you're going to divide it by four. And this is going to give you your daily, actionable stuff that you need to read one book every single week. So the start of every week, you're going to divide those number of pages, and you're going to figure that out.
Success, my friends, with goals is simple when you develop plans like this and you stick with that plan. It is very, very simple. Now, it is complicated to execute, but it is very simple in concept. So, let's use another example. Let's say, for example, you want to save money and your goal is to save
$10,000 this year. And so what you need to do is work backwards. So a lot of this, we're going to take out the old trustee calculator again. And we're going to say, for example, how much does that mean per month? So 10,000 divided by 12 means that you have need to save $833 per month if you want to save $10,000 per year, 833.33 for the old math police that are going to come out. Okay.
So we have $833 per month. Well, what if I wanted to save it on a weekly basis? You're going to take $10,000 and divide it by 52. And that's going to be $192.30 per week is what you would need to save in order to make sure that you hit your goal of $10,000 per year. And then you could take $10,000 divided by 365 on the daily basis. So you need $27.39 per day to save $10,000 per year.
Breaking this stuff down in very small actionable chunks, and you're going to get it all the way down to your daily action is so incredibly powerful. And so when you're listing out your goals, you have your smart goals in place, you have your wise, you have your smart goals in place, and now we are creating our plan, and we're breaking it out all the way down to daily actions is going to be a very, very powerful plan.
Master your money goals. We actually take this from five years. Your big giant five year goals and we break it all the way down into eight daily actions. And it is something I think that is so powerful for a lot of people. So the big lesson is don't leave your future to chance. You gotta make sure that you have an actionable plan that you can do daily. Something that you're gonna do day in and day out. Now it doesn't have to be seven days a week, but it can be something, hey, I wanna work out four days a week. I need to make sure I'm hitting those four days every single week and I'm tracking it. That is what the most important thing is because discipline
is the bridge between goals and accomplishment. If you can stay disciplined and you have these daily actions, it's going to allow you to accomplish any goal that you want. Now, the next thing we need to do is once we have these goals in place and we have our SMART goal set up, we have our Y, and in addition, we have our plan in place, now we need to keep score.
And keeping score is really important. This is going to be how you actually measure your progress. Now, first, keeping score is essential for a number of different things. One, it keeps you aware and awareness creates action. And so it's very important that when you track your progress, it keeps the goals front and center and you need your goals front and center at all times.
This is why when people write down their goals, they're trying to get it front and center. And so they're more likely to accomplish those goals, but you need a system on when you're going to review those goals, how often you're going to review those goals. And it's going to allow you to celebrate the winds and the big milestone. So you maintain motivation. Now motivation is going to be fleeting when you have this system into place. Goals are for suckers. Systems are for winners. And so you have to develop systems around your goals in order to accomplish them, which is what we're doing here. So what you need to do is you need to create your personal scoreboard.
What is actually going to be defined as success when you are trying to achieve these goals and master your money goals? I give you my exact scorecard that I use. It is one that I use every single year. I look at that thing daily and it's my personal scorecard that I utilize and it's a living, breathing document that I'm always using. Now here's how you can build your own. Is one, define your metrics. What will you track? For financial goals, it might be your savings rate or your investment contributions. What are the things that you are going to track? Two, is set review intervals.
How often are you going to be reviewing these goals? Are you going to review them monthly? Are you going to review them daily? Are you going to review them weekly? My suggestion is set up a day every single week and make sure that you are at least reviewing them weekly, if not daily. It is really important. Next is you can also make it visual and making it visual can really help you see the progress of that goal. Say, for example, you wanted to save $10,000 in a year. You can set something up in Excel or somewhere else.
where you have like one of those little charity thermometers that you can set up and it can start to increase over time or you can write it on a whiteboard in your room or you can, you know, have these goals where you can see visual progress. It is going to help you tremendously when you are in the down the dumps and you're like, I just can't achieve this goal. Well, you see that visual progress. Look how far I've come thus far. Those who track their progress, those who look at it visually are going to be way more successful than those just keep it up in their head.
So making sure that you track your progress and you're regularly doing this is going to allow you to achieve those goals. And then asking yourself a bunch of questions, hey, am I ahead or behind when I'm reviewing my goals? What's working? What needs adjusting? Is this actually working out? All of these are very, very important when it comes to setting up and reviewing regularly. Just imagine going to a football game or a basketball game.
and nobody's keeping score. It wouldn't be that fun. And so for most people, you need to make sure that you are keeping score. That is the key takeaway. Track it, review it, do this over and over and be disciplined about it. If you want to know how to do a daylet, do it as part of your morning routine. Just make sure you check it out, look it up, kind of fill in the information that you need to. Mine has information that I have to fill in every single day. And so because of that, that allows me to stay consistent with my goals in order to make sure that I'm accomplishing.
those goals. Now next is the weekly planning. So the daily goal planning is really important, but the weekly planning is something I think most people need to understand. So I plan out my week on Sundays and typically I will time block out my entire week to get the most out of it. And for me, I believe that success begins with a plan. I am way less productive if I do not have a plan in place every Sunday. So I'll sit down on Sundays and I will map out
my week and this is my way of ensuring that I take control over my time, that nobody else takes control of my time. If you don't take control of your time, you will never be able to be successful. Now most people, what they'll do is they'll see your open calendar and all of a sudden they'll see openings there and they say to themselves, that's my time for the taking now. And so have you ever seen this at work before where you'll have an open calendar and people will just start throwing stuff on your calendar for meetings and or they'll try to say, hey, if you have an opening, that means you're available for me.
That means that your time is serving them and not you. So in order to get your time to serve you instead of them, you need to make sure that you are time blocking ahead of time and already having things on your calendar. This is really important stuff here because people who allow other people to take their time from them never get to where they want to go. Why do they never get to where they want to go? They're going to get down the end of the line over the course of 10 years and they're going to say, I never accomplished my goals.
Why? You never accomplish your goals because you gave your time to everyone else instead of yourself. You've got to make sure that you have time for yourself to do your deep work, to do your manager tasks, to do the things that you need to be doing in order to achieve those goals that you want to achieve. Never give your time away and weekly planning is where that starts. That's what I noticed is that people would try to take my time from me if I had an opening in my calendar. Guess what? If my calendar is open, that's my time to use. That's my time to utilize and I will dictate when I'm going to go to specific things.
That's how I want your mindset to shift. Now, if you work in the corporate world, it's a little tougher if your boss is putting meetings on your calendar all left and right. But if you can plan your week out properly, you can time block some spots on your calendar. This is going to help you be so much more productive of work. You're going to make way more money. It's going to be a huge, huge different because the
inputs that you put in that are actually valuable should be inputs where you are thinking through what is the end result that I want. If you're doing inputs that are just frivolous and they don't really matter, you're going to get nowhere and you're going to spin your wheel. So just making sure that you think through that isn't really, really important. Now weekly planning is something that I think is really important.
Now, in the webinar, I'm going to show you how I actually plan out my week. I'm going to show you my Sunday night ritual and how I think about this. But what I want you to do is set aside some time to plan, review those goals, and then time block out some of those priorities so that you know when you are going to be doing some of those things to accomplish those goals. So that's my challenge to you is right now, set aside some time so that you can plan all of this out and accomplish those goals. Then ask yourself, if I was going to be the most successful I could possibly be this week, what would that look like?
What actions would I take? What things would I do? How would my fitness goals align? How would I spend more time with my family? How would I be able to achieve all of my career or business goals? What are some of the things that I'd be doing throughout the week and then you start to work through that process? So in that webinar,
we will actually be talking through my exact planning process and how I think about that. It takes me about 15 minutes every single week and it is one that I absolutely have to do otherwise my whole week's ruined. So I now have to do my Sunday ritual every single week and it is one of my favorite things I do every single week. Well listen, this is how you set up smart goals. Again, we're gonna review this at the top.
You figure out what your Y is. You set up those smart goals. Then once you have the smart goals in place, then you develop a plan for those smart goals. Once you have a plan for those smart goals, then you are actually going to work out a scorecard. How do I figure out if these goals are successful? When you have the scorecard in place, now we're going to put it into our week to make sure we are taking action every single day to accomplish those goals. And by systematically doing this,
over and over and over again, you can accomplish so many different things. Now, if you can't join the webinar, we also have a course called Master Your Money Goals that teaches you exactly how to master your money goals in this exact system in great detail. I give you all my forms. I give you all my worksheets. I have a bunch of questions to figure out your why and if you don't know what some of your goals are, I have a workbook that you can work through so you can figure out what your why is for your goals so that you can figure out which specific goals may be best for you. In addition,
We give you my time blocking sheets. And I give you so many different extras and master your money goals. Go ahead and check that out. We only release that every year on the new year. And so make sure that you go ahead and check out master money goals. If you want to accomplish your goals this year, we'll link it up down the show notes down below. Again, thank you guys so much for listening to this episode. I truly appreciate each and every single one of you. And we will see you on the next episode.
