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Setting Financial Goals

What, are you even ready to get started? So I did a little bit. We're talking ahead of time, but raise your hands if you currently are investing in some form, which is awesome. And I think what happens a lot of times is you realize, Hey, this is an important thing. I know we need to do this. This is part of adult ing, but I have a lot going on on the flip side, sometimes people get over eager and they start aggressively investing when they haven't figured everything else out yet. So we're going to go through this checklist that I've devised for you to determine whether or not you're actually ready to be investing. No, I do want to call something out really important up top here. When we're talking about investing, there's two ways to think about it. There are retirement accounts, which are tax advantaged accounts. When you're investing for retirement, you're getting a break in your taxes, either now or in the future when you take your money out, depending on if it's a Roth or tradition...

al. Don't worry, I will further explain those if you don't know those terms, but you're getting a tax advantage. Now the other thing that we like to talk about when we come to investing are taxable accounts. So these are two different types of accounts. You should be investing for retirement. I'm going to talk about it time and time again when we're going through this checklist. What I'm really referring to are using taxable accounts. So that's investing in a way that's not specifically for retirement. It's either. Maybe you're buying individual stocks. Maybe you're buying index funds, and mutual funds may be using a robo advisor or an app. But it's something that's more of a medium to long term goal. That's not retirement, so that if you wanted to sell that tomorrow, you could You would have to pay some taxes on it. But there's not gonna be any sort of tax penalty for doing so. If you right now wanted to sell something out of your retirement account, getting get hit with a penalty. So it's important to understand when I say a taxable account taxable investing account. Those are really what I'm referring to going through this checklist and I will keep clarifying that point as we go the very first part of this checklist sounds super easy. You have to set a financial goal. Does somebody want to share a financial goal that they have in the next five years? Come on, someone can do it. Yeah, with just so then the next five years, she wants to purchase the car. To me, that would be an example of a short term financial goal. We have to sit down and write down short, medium and long term goals, usually short were saying 0 to 3 years. But if you have a hard deadline of five, I wouldn't invest any of the money that you want for that car that you want to buy. Medium. We're usually talking about 4 to 10 years long term goals being 10 years. Plus, it sounds so easy to set financial goals. Honestly, it could be a little hard because you have to be very prescriptive. You have to sit down and think about a timeline, and you have to think about how much money it's going to take for you to get there. And the reason this is gold. This is thing number one on the checklist is because the goals that you have dictate everything when it comes to your investments, the type of investments you're gonna buy, how much risk you're gonna put on your money That's all dictated by your goals. Without step one, you're not ready to invest yet to master and cash flow. The less sexy term is the B word budgeting. So if this is something that causes you a lot of angst, I would really encourage you actually to go back to my first class. So get your financial life together. Boot camp. We have a very long intensive section on. Budgeting goes into a lot of details about different styles, but you have to mask your cash flow before you're allowed to invest because you need to know how much money is coming in and how much money is going out without that information. You cannot make any decisions because it's essential for you to have a nitty gritty of exactly how much money you have at your disposal before you are making any sort of choices about investing. The other thing is, can you easily pay all of your bills every month if you're in the scraping by phase or the paycheck to paycheck cycle phase, you are probably not ready to be investing. I'm gonna take probably out you're not ready to be investing and again go back to the get your financial life together. Boot can go through that first and then you'll be ready. Toe Learn. Well, you should learn more, but you'll be ready to take on investing afterwards. Next is the Almighty Emergency Fund. It's a really essential thing for you to have of emergency fund before you start investing. And the reason I say that is because things are going to happen in your life. Well, no, it we've all been through it. I do not want you to be investing your emergency fund. Sometimes that could be a controversial opinion. The reason I wanted to be We call it liquid, easily accessible and principal protected all jargon. Terms were saying, Put it in a savings account and let it grow there. And the reason I don't like to invested at all. I don't even like a low risk quote unquote investment, because when you need that money, you need it now most of the time, and also it feels like your car breaks down and your doggies a bag of brownie mix the same time that the market goes through a correction and you're gonna lead losing a lot of money if you sell those investments. That's why I like to say, Put that money somewhere where it's protected now the emergency fund rule of thumb. This is what often stresses people out 3 to 6 months worth of living expenses need to be saved up before you are ready to take on investing. But I want to talk about what that means because a lot of times I think we hear that number, and it sounds so big and so stressful. It's not at your current lifestyle. It's at your bare bones lifestyle, so it's not you getting to go out to eat and hang out with your friends and grab lunch out when you need to. It's my bills are paid, my lights are on rent or my mortgage is covered. My transportation is covered. I can pay any of the debts that I have. It's that number. Whatever your bare minimum number is, that's what you need. 3 to 6 months off. Now, if you want to kick it up a little bit, so you can keep your current lifestyle totally your call. But I like to mention that because it takes a little bit of the stress off of how big that number feels like it can get. And you want your consumer debt paid off. When I say consumer debt, I'm really talking about credit cards. Also, if it's a payday loan or a title loan, anything with that really nasty high interest rate, we want that stuff gone. Credit cards usually have between a 15 to 30% a PR on them. I'm going to be totally honest with you. The odds of you consistently getting those kind of returns in the market are nuts. It's probably not gonna happen again. I think I can take out the word, probably. So you want to be paying off all of your consumer debt before you focus it all on investing. So if you have credit card debt, knock that sucker out student loans. This is a little bit of a different animal, and we get into the debt section. We're going to talk about some of the nuances of whether or not you can be investing while you're paying down your student loans the thing. I like to think about it. It can take you 10 2025 plus years to pay those off. Let's think back to Leslie and Ben. Ben waited years to start investing, and he doubled down how much he was putting in and still couldn't catch up. So, in your student loan life, if you're waiting until you have them totally paid off before you start investing even into a retirement vehicle, that's really gonna put you at a disadvantage. So I think that it is important to consider this a balancing act. But you need to be current on your student loan. So nothing and delinquency, nothing in default. You need to be making sure those payments are happening every month. Then you gotta prepare for those short term goals. Think back to gold One. What are the things that you want to be doing in 0 to 3 years? Because you need to make sure that you have the cash flow set aside for when those things come up and this is outside of your emergency fund. So examples of this, I think, is when your car starts to make those odd noises, you know you're gonna need a new car soon. My husband and I just moved recently. That's really expensive dream of seriously a mile up the street, and it's still so expensive to move. And again, you know, you never know what's gonna happen with a medical expense. It could be anticipated or not. So it's good to make sure that you are prepared for anything that's on the horizon, especially things that you know we're going to come up Number seven ZZ. You're doing it right now. If you're watching online or if you're sitting here in the class, you are taking the time to educate yourself about the market. And that's such a crucial part of learning how to be an investor and number eight as you start preparing for retirement. I talked a little bit in the beginning about the difference between taxable accounts and retirement vehicles with her tax advantaged. I hate that we say, save for retirement. I think that's a misnomer. And the reason At the beginning, before we started the class, I said it, show your hands if you're an investor and not everybody's hands went up and I'm curious for the people who didn't raise their hands. If you have a 401 K or an IRA or some sort of retirement vehicle, because if you do, you're investing. But we don't think about ourselves as investors, and I think part of it is the language that gets used. You're saving for retirement. But truthfully, you're investing for retirement and it's really important because language has power to remember that, because I think it makes us feel a little bit better. You know more in control of our investing lives, but make sure if you have money in any of those retirement vehicles that it's actually invested. We'll talk about that a bit at the end when we talk about retirement. So go through all of this checklist and you might be feeling like, uh, still too much of a broke millennial to get started, And that's totally okay. If you were in a situation where credit card debt is still nagging at you, maybe your emergency fund isn't there yet. At least you're taking step number seven and you're educating yourself. So win that credit card deck. It's paid down. When your emergency fund is on point, you are immediately ready to get started in the market. And while you're going through all of this, please make sure to take advantage of for one case or IRAs. Please be investing for retirement, especially if you have the option of an employer match. We'll talk a little bit more about that later.