Personal Finance Goal: Buying a

Personal Finance Goal: Buying a New Home and Saving in my Roth IRA One of the most powerful aspects of goals is that they have the ability to energize and focus people's efforts to attain greater accomplishments than if they had just let fate or circumstance guide them. It's been my experience that the more passionate someone is about a goal, the greater the five principles of goal setting work together to keep the accomplishment in greater focus and more attainable as a result.

My goals are to buy a home and also save $15,000 in my Roth IRA. It's been my experience that the factors affecting this goal include ongoing costs, some fixed yet many variable, including the price of food, gasoline, electricity, entertainment and leisure travel. Cutting back on all of these elements has helped also get me more focused on my two very, challenging economic goals. The decisions to not spend have been more efficient, there's not so much time wasted debating the value of spending vs.

saving when the goals of a new home and $15,000 in a Roth IRA are engrained in my way of seeing trade-offs now when it comes to budgeting and spending. The five principles of goal setting including clarity, challenge, commitment, feedback and task complexity are all critical foundational elements for any goal to be attained.

In defining the goal of buying a new home, the clarity of the specific type of house, the price range I can afford, and most important of all, the size of the down payment all are clearly defined. The clarity of the goal for getting $15,000 saving in a Roth IRA leads me to say "no" to spending on other items I would typically say "yes" to.

I am finding the greater the clarity of the goal, the easier it is to shut out distractions and other potential detracting elements and stay entirely committed to accomplishing it. The clarity of the home and Roth IRA goal together are galvanizing in their focus on my spending habits, giving me ample reasons to reject spending on items that may not be as critical as I once thought. The challenge of saving for a home and getting $15,000 into a Roth IRA is the most difficult principle of goal setting.

There are many challenges to saving for a down payment and also getting a significant amount into a Roth IRA. What makes this dimension of goal setting so challenging are the unforeseen events and older appliances that tend to break, and the car repairs. It's my observation that challenges can either crush your commitment to your goal or make it stronger. Whenever an appliance breaks or a car needs a major repair, it is easy to lose focus and begin to give up.

I have found that the principles of goal setting help significantly in this regard. The third principle of goal setting is commitment. This specific principle of goal setting is invaluable in that it underscores and supports all the rest. It also helps in the decision-making process of which objective to choose to pursue or not, as commitment needs to.