How Committed Are You To Your Financial Goals?

August 09, 2013

As my friends, family and coworkers know, I am a bit of a news & politics junkie. Because of my interest in the area, I love to read look-backs about elections. Why did one candidate lose and another win?  Especially in close races, there are usually a few obvious things that help turn the election in favor of one candidate over the other.

This article about the 2012 Presidential Election illustrates one of the key reasons that Mitt Romney can walk down the street without Secret Service protection while Barack Obama creates a major traffic disruption in every city he visits. The part that most illustrates to me what was missing in the Romney campaign is when the author mentions the family vote that took place. 12 votes were cast & 10 of them were for Mitt to NOT run for president, including Mitt’s personal vote! His heart wasn’t in it; he wasn’t passionate about the process. And that appeared to show through.

If you think back to some of the presidents we’ve had in my lifetime, there have been some VERY passionate candidates.  Barack Obama clearly is one of them, as was Ronald Reagan.  Politics aside, passion and commitment oozed from every pore of their bodies.  Not coincidentally, both won two presidential elections.

This commitment/lack of commitment reminds me of two people I recently met with to discuss the progress they’ve made on eliminating their credit card debt. Both people were in very similar situations. I remember needing to look at my notes to remember their names because of all the similarities in the facts of each case. Each of them had gotten into about $40,000 in credit card debt. They had similar family structures, incomes, rent payments, etc. They were mirror images of each other when I met them about two weeks apart last year.

We have since done quarterly update meetings. One of them has made absolutely no progress and has cancelled two of our four meetings.  She’d like to make progress, but isn’t committed to it.

The other person had total commitment. She never cancelled an appointment; she emailed with a few questions in between meetings, and in the last year, she has been able to trim her $40,000 in credit card debt down to ~$25,000. She is completely committed to paying back every dollar of her debt. Her thought process was that she knowingly and willingly ran it up to that level so she’s going to be the one to eliminate it.

I’ve started calling our meetings “brag sessions” so she can come in and tell me how well she’s doing.  She has completely changed her spending habits and her lifestyle choices and is firmly committed to making a difference in her financial life.  It’s very impressive.  She is working a second job part-time and using every dollar of that income to pay down debt. At this pace, she’ll be out of debt in less than 2 years. The first person I mentioned will, at this pace, have her debt forever.  If not longer!

When you are looking at your goals, setting new ones or updating the tracking of your goals (I’m assuming we all do this, right?), sometimes it might help you to understand WHY you have each goal.  What’s the purpose?  What’s the payoff after reaching it?  Why is it important to you?

An exercise you can do is to write down 2-3 goals for your life (financial or non-financial) and then write a short paragraph about why the goal matters to you and how you expect to feel when the goal is reached.  I know it sounds a little silly but give it a try. The more personal you make your goals, the more committed to them you become. The more committed you become, the faster you reach your goal.Maybe if Mitt Romney had done this, he could have pulled the upset and beaten a sitting president…