Inkandescent Public Relations

Each year we celebrate a new year in the Chinese Zodiac. As an Asian American, I often think back to my childhood when I learned about the 12 creatures represented in the Chinese calendar, with a different animal and its attributes celebrated each year.

2014 is the Year of the Horse. The spirit of the horse encapsulates a good approach to setting financial goals. It reflects unremitting efforts to improve, and is energetic, bright, warmhearted, intelligent, and able.

As inventor Thomas Alva Edison said, “Good fortune is what happens when opportunity meets with planning.” Indeed financial planning is the process of meeting your life goals through the proper management of your financial resources.

While making New Year’s resolutions demonstrates the best of intentions, a more practical option is to develop new goals for the future and chart the path to reach them on a realistic timetable.

Goals are more viable than resolutions for a few key reasons:

• Identifying the right goals, developing your written plan to reach those goals, and implementing the action steps required to attain those goals makes all the difference.

• Sharing your goals is an important part of goal-setting. When you share your goals, you gain an instant support network of people who have a vested interest in your success. This also leads to conversation around your goals so that you can gain the insight and knowledge you need to achieve them.

• Setting resolutions can be overwhelming if you state them in absolute terms. Avoid making resolutions such as, “I won’t go to Starbucks anymore,” or “I will go to the gym every morning.” These resolutions are stated so rigidly that if you deviate at all from these absolutes you may feel like a failure. Try instead setting goals that can advance your progress, such as, “I will go out for coffee two or three times a week instead of every day,” or “I will increase the number of times I go to the gym each week.”

• While accomplishing your biggest goals may seem daunting, goals become attainable when you take baby steps. As you become more comfortable with the changes, it will get easier to add new goals to your plan. It will also be easier to sustain the growth you’ve accomplished.

• Goals provide a sense of purpose and direction. But be patient with yourself. It’s easy to revert to past habits and abandon your resolutions. Rather than give up when your goals feel elusive, use the opportunity to modify your plans by selecting an alternative activity.

• Don’t lose track of your goal, even when you’re experiencing a setback. For example, suppose you want to save more money for retirement. You might make a resolution to reduce your travel and entertainment budget so that you can save $5,000 per year to deposit in a Roth IRA. But if you find that curtailing your travel and entertainment so drastically makes you feel deprived and miserable, you probably won’t stick to your resolution, and you’ll end up no better off than you are now. Instead, try setting a more modest, achievable goal. If you decide to save an extra $100 to $200 per month towards your Roth IRA, you may discover that not only are you challenging yourself, but that what initially is uncomfortable becomes comfortable and you are able to meet or exceed your goal.

Don’t fritter away the opportunity that the beginning of the year gives us to plan. What you write down now, you can make come true. But don’t wait for the beginning or end of a year to act on your plans. Any time is a good time to make plans to achieve your financial goals.

“Plans are nothing; planning is everything.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower