That which is measured improves. Easier said than done when you're trying to figure out your personal finance goals for the next 30 years. So how do you keep you personal finance goals on track? It all starts with SMART goal setting. In this episode we'll work through the foundations of setting big and small SMART personal finance goals so you can stay on track to reach your modest millions.

IN THIS WEEK'S EPISODE

* The importance of setting goals for your personal finances
* What are SMART goals?
* Why do your personal finance goals need to be SMART?
* Setting macro and micro personal finance goals
* How we use Google Drive to run our budget and track our goals
* A breakdown of our family's SMART personal finance goals

TRANSCRIPT
Setting SMART Personal Finance Goals
On this podcast, we talk a lot about looking to the future and charting our path to our modest millions. Heck, it’s in the introduction for each episode. We might want to retire in 10, 20, 30 years, or we might want to go on more vacations, or we might want to have a second home or buy some rental property.
Too often, and I’ve been guilty about this as well, we dream pretty big. We figure we’ll shoot high and in the hopes that we’ll get most of the way there (as Mrs. Modest would remind me from high school, “Shoot for the moon and if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” Or, conversely, we don’t dream big enough and say things like, “Oh, I could never retire early. That’s an impossible goal.”
So, why do we find ourselves saying such things about our goals and setting ourselves up for failure to reach them? It’s because we don’t set SMART goals along the way.
The path to successfully reaching our personal finance goals is paved by SMART goals. SMART personal finance goals help you stay on track so you can hit more milestones throughout your journey to modest millions.
So, what are SMART goals? SMART is an acronym for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely. It’s a concept that is popular in the workplace, and something that I do in my day-to-day work in marketing to help make sure we can accurately track our success. So, what I want to do today is apply these principles to personal finance to help us all achieve our personal finance goals.
Start by thinking about a goal you want to accomplish. Go ahead, I’ll wait for a minute to get something in mind.

Specific
Think of this as the general framework of your goal. It should aim to answer the five Ws: who, what, when, where and why.

Who needs to be involved in the achievement of this goal?
What, specifically, are you wanting to accomplish with this goal?
When are you wanting to accomplish this goal?
Is there a location that is involved in this goal?
What is the reason for this goal?

Measurable
Pearson’s Law states “That which is measured, improves.” Personal finance goals are no different. How else are you going to figure out if you’re on track toward hitting your goals? This category includes any measurable criteria: time, dollars, percentages, quantities, etc.

Attainable
This is where shooting for the moon is put in check. Setting unattainable personal finance goals is demoralizing. If you’re set up for failure from the get-go, it’s going to be harder and harder for you to find future personal finance success. Make sure your goals are attainable. One way to do that is to look at the penultimate goal at the macro level, and then work backward by setting smaller micro level goals. They should always logically ladder up to your primary goal. This provides a good set of checks and balances to make sure they’re attainable.

Relevant
If you’re setting personal finance goals,