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Weekend Reading: How to Set Smart Goals for Your Investments

Posted:
|Financial Planning |Investments |"Yahoo Finance" Articles
This article appears as part of Casey Weade's Weekend Reading for Retirees series. Every Friday, Casey highlights four hand-picked articles on trending retirement topics and delivers them straight to your email inbox. Get on the list here.
Weekend reading setting smart goals Weekend reading setting smart goals

Weekend Reading

I’m an avid goal-setter in many areas of my life. Needless to say, that includes my investments. They have a purpose, they’re led by a strategy but I also need to gauge if they’re on track with where I need them to go, and I’m able to do this through intentional goal-setting.

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How to be successful with S.M.A.R.T: Whether in your financial life, or any other aspect of life you’re looking to make improvements in, creating a goal can be a powerful tool to get you there. This article features one goal-setting strategy in particular I have followed, called S.M.A.R.T. It not only helps organize your thinking, but also keeps you accountable for reaching that target in the time you’ve set for yourself. Here’s what it means:

📌S – Specific: Your goals should be clear, and the more specific, the better

📌M – Measurable: After you’ve set your goal, you need to determine how you will achieve it, which makes measuring your progress (through metrics is ideal), so important

📌A – Achievable: Ask yourself, are your goals truly practical and can they be comfortably met?

📌R – Realistic/Relevant: In the case of your investments, this is about evaluating how your goal fits into your overall financial or retirement plan, and means asking: Should I meet this goal?

📌T – Time Bound: As the article states, “Nothing focuses the mind like a deadline”, and knowing your timeline will help you understand how much time and effort each of your goals will require

Dictate your direction: If you don’t have a map, how do you expect to reach your destination? Unfortunately, most have only a general idea of where they want to go, and may never get there as a result. With proper planning, that doesn’t have to be you.
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