How to achieve your goal without financial stress

DO you have big goals in life? Making your first million? Buy­ing your dream house or car? Help­ing your loved ones financially?

All of us have big goals in life. However, this is what I’ve discov­ered in achieving our goals: “The bigger the goals, the bigger the challenges.”

Sometimes we get overwhelmed and impatient in the process. But in order for you to achieve what you want, you need to take the stairs because there is no elevator for success. Part of achieving your financial goal is to live a frugal kind of life.

I know a person who has big goals like buying their car at the same time wanting to travel with the entire family altogether. How­ever their resources are limited.

In order to hit their financial goals, they resorted to using credit cards. Now they are living in fi­nancial stress since they are now living in debt. All of these things are possible. However, we have to tackle it one at a time.

And so the question that I have for you today is: “How can we achieve our goal without living in financial stress?”

Simplicity – The reason why we live in so much financial stress because we tend to complicate things. We need to live a life of practicality.

Why buy a new pair of shoes if you still have a good one? Why would you buy a new set of clothes just because it is on sale? Why try to spend the money that you do not have by borrowing? Why don’t we check our wardrobe and our shoe rack?

You might be surprised to real­ize that there are many things we bought but never really use or maximize at all. In others words, we are just wasting money.

Let us live in simplicity not duplicity.

Frugality – This is perhaps one of the harder lessons some people had to learn over the years. This means maximizing the value of every peso that you have. For me, it’s choosing to prioritize saving before spending. I set up a saving fund for every goal I got.

My first car is valued at P500,000. Target was to get it in two years time. So I prioritized to set aside R20,000 extra for the next 25 months.

Since I was not earning that much, I need to be creative in producing the extra money I needed to save. That means I have to sacrifice many things I used to enjoy in order to divert the funds to my car, things like eating out, taking a vacation, or upgrad­ing gadgets.

After two years of living in simplicity and frugality, I was able to buy my car in cash!

This is what I’ve done for years that helped me achieve my financial goals in life. If we can only practice these two principles in all our spending behavior and choices, then our financial life won’t be in so much trouble.

Furthermore, this philosophy of simplic­ity and frugality is not only limited to our finances, we can like­wise apply this to all facets of our life.

Take a minute and make a mental check­list of the things in your life that matter the least and those that matter more. The reality is we can never have everything that we want in life. We can’t make all the ar­eas in our life a block­buster hit – there isn’t just enough energy and time for that.

On the contrary, we can always choose to focus and redirect our energy on the areas of our lives that are more important and productive. This is the philosophy of frugal­ity not only applied to our finances but to everything else in our life.

THINK. REFLECT. APPLY.

How have you been spending your energy, time, and money late­ly? Are you spending them on things that are leading you to be productive and those that are important to you? What can hap­pen when you simply invest your money, time, and energy on everything?