Be SMART About Your Goals--Guest Post by Mindy Davis

Hi everyone! This is Robyn's other daughter Mindy AKA the favorite! (Ha! Just kidding Amy). Last week, my sister Amy challenged all of us to work on our financial journey by considering our own goals. I would like to tell you about one of my financial goals and the progress I have made in the last year.

All of us know the importance of saving money, but why does it sometimes seem hard to do? Something I have realized as I have been putting money towards savings is small amounts really add up fast. If we are consistently putting aside small amounts of money, we will be surprised at how quickly our money will grow.

Last year I decided I wanted to make more progress at putting money towards savings. In order to accomplish my goal, I wanted to make it a SMART goal. SMART is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. If you make your goal SMART, you are more likely to achieve that goal. I found this to be true last year with my goal of saving money.

Specific- what are the who, what, when, where, why's of my goal? How can I make my goal specific? Rather than having a goal to simply "increase my savings", I wanted to determine a specific dollar amount that I would save. I first started by making a chart of how much money I could save in a year if I saved different dollar amounts every paycheck. Here is one of the charts I made:

I decided that I wanted to save $5000 for the year. Since I get paid every other week, $200 per paycheck was a good starting goal and would give me $200 of wiggle room in case I missed saving one time. If I did save $200 every paycheck, I would save $5200 by the end of the year.

Measurable- how can I measure or track my progress? Since my goal was specific, I could track my progress based on if I saved the $200 every paycheck. I knew that my goal would be more likely to happen if I created a tracking or metric sheet and could mark off each time I met my goal for the pay period. (See end of post for tracking ideas.)

Attainable- is this a goal I can realistically meet? As I determined how much money I wanted to save, I needed to make sure it was a goal that I would be able to accomplish. In order to do this, I needed to determine if I would have enough of the rest of my paycheck to cover my expenses. While saving $500 every paycheck would have been awesome, I decided that $200 was more realistic with my current income. This amount will be different for everyone. You have to determine how much of your paycheck you need for your expenses and how much you can realistically put aside for savings.

Relevant- is it something that is important in my life? Saving money is beneficial for my future, so it felt pretty relevant to me. Here are a few reasons why my goal felt relevant:

• Having a savings account would help if unexpected costs came up such as car problems or medical expenses. Also, it would help in case of any loss of income.
• I started seriously thinking about buying a house and needed to build more savings in order to accomplish that.
• Building my savings could also be used for fun things such as travel, going to concerts, etc. I love to travel! (Doesn't thinking about what you could use your saved money for make you excited to save?!)

Timely- when do I want to accomplish my goal? If your goal has a timeframe, you are more likely to accomplish the goal. My time frame was one year with smaller goals of 26 pay periods in the year. To help me make my goal even more time bound, I decided to save on my actual pay day. That way it became a habit for me to transfer funds to my savings on a specific day.

In addition to making my goal SMART, I also wanted to make my goal fun. For me, this meant coming up with fun ways to track my progress (making my goal Measurable). I started a bullet journal and designated a page to tracking my savings. I brainstormed fun things I could do to track my savings. I thought of the phrase Rainy Day Fund and decided to make an umbrella with money hanging from the umbrella. Each box represented $200, so I could color in that box every pay day when I had moved $200 into my savings.

If you know me well, you know that I LOVE Mamma Mia (in fact I am writing this as I watch Mamma Mia 2 ha ha). Another idea for tracking my progress came from the song "Money, Money, Money". There's a line from the song that says "Money, money, money always sunny in a rich man's world." I made a picture with a sun and a thermometer so that I could fill in each line when I put $200 into my savings. (You can see that my artistic skills are not the greatest. Ha ha! Since my tracker was mainly for me, it didn't matter that it wasn't perfect.) It was so fun coloring in the box each paycheck. I just wanted to fill in more boxes! I loved seeing my savings grow! It was exciting.

This year I reevaluated my savings goal to determine if my goal was still SMART. I have a goal to pay off my 5 year car loan in half the time, so I decided to make two car payments a month this year. In order to accomplish this goal, I realized I needed to lower the amount I was putting into savings each paycheck. Dave Ramsey recommends saving $1000 and then working to pay off your debt as quickly as you can. I felt pretty good about the $5200 I had saved from the previous year, so I started focusing more on my goal of becoming debt free. My new goal became to save $100 every paycheck, so I will save $2600 by the end of the year.

Here are a few other ideas I came up with for Savings Trackers:

It can be as simple as keeping a log with date and amount saved. (You'll notice that there were a few weeks that I fell off the savings wagon. I was heading to England and Scotland in May 2018 and decided to put more money towards the trip at that point. Because I still wanted to reach my goal of saving $5200 by the end of the year, I had to double up and pay $400 to savings some weeks).

Rainy Day Fund- Here's a tracker I made for you to use if you would like. Fill in the raindrops with each amount saved.

Sunny Savings Tracker- Here's another tracker I made for you to use if you would like. Fill in the thermometer with each amount saved.

If you are saving for a specific thing (like a car, house, or trip), you could draw a picture of that thing and fill in boxes to create the picture. You could also use this when making a car payment/mortgage payment to track how many more payments you have left.

If you would like to join me in working on savings this year, feel free to use any of these trackers. I recommend putting the tracker where you will see it often such as on the fridge or by your computer. Hope you have as much fun as I did building your savings!