The Power of a Tangible Goal: How Dreaming Big Can Transform Your Finances
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Your Dream Life, Your Budget: Making Big Goals a Reality
My husband and I recently returned from a trip to New Mexico and Colorado, and to say we were enchanted is an understatement. (New Mexico is called the Land of Enchantment, after all!!)
I actually went to college in Colorado and have loved it since my first visit in 2004, always wanting to move back, though it just hasn't been in the cards.
So imagine my surprise when my husband started talking about how much he was loving it out there!
I mean, check out these photos. It is seriously STUNNING out there!
If you've never been out West, there's something truly magical about it. Even I was surprised by how much I enjoyed New Mexico's deserts this time around. I'm generally not a hot weather person and prefer the mountains, but those deserts pulled at me in a different way this time around.
As we explored Albuquerque and northern New Mexico, we started envisioning some dream scenarios:
What if we could live here?
What if we found a property in New Mexico? It's close enough to Colorado and still seems affordable.
Okay, but really, what would we have to do to make this a reality?
As the days passed and we talked more, we both began to realize that, as crazy as it sounded initially, why couldn't this actually happen? Many people have done crazier things, after all!
So, we started talking more seriously about how we could make it work. What kind of cash would we need to have on hand? What would a monthly payment look like? How do we go about finding a realtor in that area?
In fact, I went so far as to put it as a new category in our YNAB budget!
Since those first days of our trip, everything has shifted for us because we now have a tangible goal we are both incredibly interested in achieving. Pretty much every conversation we have had since then gets turned into something related to how we can make this happen. Found a penny in a parking lot? Let's add that to the NM/CO property budget! How can we make more money so that we can put it towards a NM property? Should we go out to dinner tonight or would we rather save it for a property out west?
It is so easy to make decisions with our money because we both want this so much more than the things that used to distract us in our daily lives.
This is exactly why I have my clients think about their dream life during our first session—before we even get into the numbers. I refer to it as Your Greatest Life. What is the best possible life you can dream up? What would that look like? How would you be living? How would your life be different on a daily basis?
Then, we start looking at the numbers. What does your budget need to look like in order to make that happen? Are there things that you are currently spending money on that suddenly seem less important than your bigger goals? For instance, with YNAB, you assign every dollar a purpose, which helps you see exactly where your money is going and make intentional choices. This process, known as giving every dollar a job, is YNAB's first rule of budgeting and helps eliminate mental accounting that can lead to overspending.
Without taking the time to dream about your bigger life, it is so easy to get caught up in the small, everyday things that are keeping you stuck. But once you find that goal that you are willing to do just about anything to achieve, that extra streaming subscription suddenly becomes way less appealing and much easier to cancel.
So, what are your big goals? What would you like your life to look like? And what changes are you willing to make in order to have those dreams become a reality? Take some time to dig into these questions, and you might be surprised at what you discover.
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