How To Achieve Your Financial Goals

Photo by Dodie Legaspi

Last Friday July 4, 2014, I attended the Money Summit and Wealth Expo held at the SMX Convention Center. It provided a lot of learning and information about investing, saving, money management and personal finance through the exhibitors and the various financial topics discussed by different financial experts during the money summit.

One of the topic discussed, that I'd like to share, is about changing the way you think about money. Conducted by Christopher Casipit, Head of Business Development, Agency Sales Group at Philam Life.

The speakers discussed that a lot of Filipinos want to have a lot of money and become rich. But only a few are willing to grab the opportunities that appear in front of them.

Why is that? 

It's because most Filipinos are naturally shy. They say that they want to have a lot of money and become rich, but they don't back it with any sort of action. They just say it talk about it, hope for it, and dream about it. Your dream won't manifest itself, you need to take action. Do something to achieve your dreams.

Others, on the other hand, rely on the government or their family to take care of them when they retire and grow old. At first this will probably work, but when your children start to have a family of their own, problems will start to arise. Your children may have promised to care for you when you grow old, but understand that they will also have their own family to take care of.

You also can't expect the government to take care of you. It will be financially impossible to provide adequate pension to millions of retired people, even if graft and corruption is not a problem, Imagine just giving P10,000 a month to 10 million retired people, that's P100 billion a month. I don't think the SSS or GSIS have that kind of money to give to people (these are just rough estimates). Instead of relying on others, you take care of yourself

The speaker said that Personal Finance is 20% knowledge and 80% behavior. Which basically mean that people achieving your financial goals, should start with the proper mindset. Knowing what to do alone, won't be enough to make you rich, you need to have the proper behavior and mindset to do it.

The speaker provided several things you need to do to achieve your financial goals:

1. Stat with the objective - Set smart financial goals and develop a financial plan with your family (if you have one already). It's important that you include your family in doing this because the financial goals you set, will directly affect them as well. Besides getting rich is a team game and not a one-man show.
2. Effort and hard work is required - Getting rich is not a one time big event. It is a long process full of ups and downs. There is no shortcut to achieving, you need to work hard and work smart for it.
3. Don't just dream, take action - A lot of people dream of becoming rich, but only a few are willing to do the action necessary to achieve it. Don't be just sit around and dream of becoming rich, stand up and take action on your dreams. Educate yourself and your family, learn what you need to do. Look for mentors who can guide you. Just take the first step and do something.
4. Commit yourself to your plan - I'd like to add this to the list as I believe commitment will be the key to achieving your financial goals. It's not enough that you just make a plan and execute it, you also have to commit yourself to following through with your plan. You'll experience bumps along the way, and without commitment, you'll just give up at the first sign of trouble. So be committed.

Remember we are in charge of our own future and retirement. No one will do this for us, nor will our finances magically take care of themselves to provide us with enough for retirement.  So we must change our mindset and start to take charge of our own future.