setting financial goals

I’m a person who likes to write things down. Most days, I write a to-do list to help me prioritize and plan. I also keep notes at meetings and write shopping lists. So, it made sense to me when our Summit Credit Union financial coach told us about the importance of writing down our financial goals. It was fairly simple for me to write down a timeline of goals for debt reduction. The hard part was combining my goals with Noah’s goals, which were of a different nature. His goals were things like “celebrate our anniversary without worrying about money” and learning to “focus on debt without overthinking it.” These conceptual goals didn’t align with my mathematical thinking, and matching our long-term goals was considerably harder than creating one of my regular to-do lists.

When I write lists, I create them and then usually toss or lose them by the end of the day. Our financial goals are something that will not disappear and that we’ll work toward together. It is exciting to think about reaching these goals, but we each have a long way to go in trusting ourselves and each other, because we have tried and failed at these things before. I want to believe that this time we will be successful. We are taking the time to have conversations about our goals, and we continue to come back to them because our financial coach encourages us to stay on track. Before we started Project Money, I had imagined that it would be prescriptive; someone would tell us where to move our money and we’d do it. Instead, we are being asked to dig deeper to think about where we want to go together. It feels challenging, but it also feels like an investment in ourselves and something that we should have done a long time ago.