30-Day Investing Challenge, Day 6: Set a Long Term Goal
Long term goals are what we hear about most: retirement, building a college fund, starting a company, retiring early, etc. Usually these goals take 10+ years to accomplish and are where you can take the most risk with your investments. Personally, these are my favorite things to dream about. It’s often the things that will take awhile to achieve and require patience that are the most exciting.
For example, imagine yourself taking off work for a year to backpack around Europe or immerse yourself in vanlife and visit all the National Parks in the continental US (two of my personal goals because I love to travel). Or what about starting that dream business, like a cat cafe with a yoga studio in the back (again: another dream I have).
Long term goals are often deemed end-goals, but I’d like to rename them to freedom goals, or better yet beginning goals. These are the milestones that start a new, better chapter in your life. For me it’ll be choosing not to work full time in the corporate tech space anymore and spending more time with my family, traveling, and gardening.
Action Step: Set 2-5 Long Term Goals
Think of 2-5 things you’d like to achieve in the next 10+ years and write them down using this template:
Goal name
Goal description and why you want to achieve it
When you want to achieve it (either a specific date, month and year, or just year is fine)
If you set short term goals that are a part of a long term goal, make sure to reflect that in your document*
Feel free to set more than 5 if you wish, this is your life vision!
Make sure to come back tomorrow for your next challenge: taking stock (pun intended) of your investment accounts
*You may have more than one short term goal that fits within a long term goal. For example, if your short term goal is to get to $10k in your investments then another short term goal is to get to $20k, this could be a part of your larger goal of reaching your Financial Independence number that you calculated on day 3.
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