Mike

Writing down goals is standard advice outside of the PF world, with a whole bunch of actual science to prove its effectiveness. Why it works is a lot harder to prove (and massively subjective), but from my experience, written goals just have more “weight”, they have a larger impact on our reality than simply verbalized goals.

Really, the dedicated goal achievers have written plans and tracking charts and all kinds of further tools. But they all involve higher accountability, higher “solidity” of reality.

For example, you used to have the subtitle of “retiring at 45″ on your old blog. But “retirement” is really a nebulous concept. At best, for most people, it means “quit the daily 9-5 grind”. But heck, I do that for a few weeks every year when I take my vacation.

If you take the time to “define retirement”, you’re far more likely to achieve that goal. If you grab a Derek Foster or a Timothy Ferriss, they both figured out what they wanted to do every day (work or not) and ran with it.

Derek Foster is living off of dividend income. He decided that he wanted to spend his days with his kids (and writing books obviously). To everyone else he’s “retired at 34″, but it sounds to me like he’s just doing something “different” with his life, right?

Either way, defining words, concepts, goals is important. Writing them down is the 101 of definition.

BTW, as a side note, does this book register as inane for people other than me? I mean “organize your finances”, “write down your goals”, isn’t this like the early chapters from pretty much any book on organizing your personal finances? Sounds like a “library borrow” to me.

Last Nov., a bunch of us bloggers committed to eating at home at lot more instead of going out and gave each other weekly updates. Maybe time for something similar in Jan?

I’d jump in – even though I’m a money coach, I still drop off the plan periodically when life gets too fast.

Mike