In this episode, Robert talks to Erin Lowry about how to stay on track with your personal finance goals.
Robert Leonard:
How can someone tell if they’re on track with their money at their current age?
Erin Lowry:
Now there are plenty of benchmarks that exist. So if you want to get yourself real riled up, Google the thing you’re interested in, benchmark, and see what happens. I think it was about a year ago, it could have even been to an article about how much you’re supposed to save for retirement, which I should say invested for retirement at different ages went semi-viral and got people all kinds of worked up, because one of them is that you should have one extra salary by the age of 30, which a lot of people did not have, do not have will not have. So that makes people feel some type of way. And that’s very understandable, especially if you either had to delay investing for retirement, you didn’t have access to do it. You didn’t have the bandwidth and your budget to do it. That’s why people tend to get upset. I would say take all benchmarks with a grain of salt. You are playing your own game. If you find it motivating, because if you’re a really competitive person and you like being like, “Oh, that person just saved $100,000 by x age, I’m going to go do that too.” And if it’s motivating for you, great. And if it’s not, cut out the noise and just focus on what are your actual goals, what do you personally want to achieve? And then start to backwards plan from there.
Robert Leonard:
I mean, I completely agree. And I think what’s interesting about the benchmarks, or what’s difficult about the benchmarks is there’s sometimes outliers and so if they’re not using a median, you can sometimes be comparing yourself to something that’s not realistic, and you know, discourage yourself for no reason. And if you if you know that you’re so far away from that benchmark, I feel like a lot of people are just going to get discouraged and not not continue to work for their goals. And not too many episodes ago, just a few episodes ago, we had Doug Boneparth on the show and he talked about how he works with millennials that make upwards of $600,000 to over a million dollars a year and you know, those millennials are in your benchmarks. And so take like you said, take it with a grain of salt and just realize that everybody’s going at their own speed. And just because you’re not necessarily at the benchmarks, or even if you’re above the benchmarks, it doesn’t mean anything in particular.
Erin Lowry:
Yeah and I would just say too, you do your own goal-setting and set a quote-unquote, realistic goal and then set a goal for yourself. So that even if you don’t hit the higher end, you can still hit something. And I personally am a big fan of micro goals, which sounds kind of strange. But if you have a big overarching goal, and I feel like so many people right now, it’s like, I want to reach a million dollars by X age. So if that’s your goal, great. But then niche it down to say, you know, how much each month of this year do I want to be putting away to service that overall larger goal or if you have a personal development goal, how many books per year in the genre do I want to read or whatever it is. I feel like having those smaller, very achievable goals, since sort of like the debt snowball of life is figuring out then how to do something small so everyone loves check things off a list.
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