A goal without a plan is useless

I volunteer as a career coach in an organization within my community. The role involves following up with people, providing encouragement and acting as a resource to help them accomplish their financial goals. My observation has been that a majority of folks, after setting up their financial goal, do not set up plans or action sets needed to accomplish that goal. It's like they get so fired up and excited at the initial stage of setting up the goal but fail to follow through with action steps and plans. A goal without a plan is just a waste of your time and resources.

In order to make sure that you achieve your goals, the following steps are helpful:

• Set the goal. Make sure the goal is specific and easily measurable so that it's easy to know when the goal as been accomplished. For instance, it's better to set up a goal to "create an emergency fund of $1,000" rather than a goal that states "create an emergency fund with enough money".

• Set up a realistic time period for accomplishing the goal.

• Break the goal into mini goals and create action plans and steps needed to accomplish these goals.

• Set up a period either weekly, bi-weekly, monthly,quarterly, etc during which your goals, action plans and steps are reviewed and also your progress to date is evaluated. Make adequate changes where required. It's possible that as you progress, things change and you know become aware of situations and factors which you did not think of earlier.
  

Hopefully, by following the steps highlighted above, your goal will now become clearer and you'll get a sense of accomplishment as you move closer towards knocking that goal out of the park!

Your comments about this article are appreciated.