The Real Goal

I stumbled across a post over on Mighty Bargain Hunter – What is Financial Retirement? and I couldn’t help but agree with it.

Especially the following quote:

Retirement is about Money, not Age

I just wanted to write a quick post on this, since this says in a few words what I’ve been saying my plan was for a while.

I have variously described my plan as “Retiring at 40 but not actually stopping work“. That sounds ok but it’s a little confusing. Then I changed to something more like “Well, not actually retiring, but just not working for someone else.” It turns out all of these things are true.

The Real Goal (as SMART)

Watching the hundreds of blog posts about New Year Resolution’s (which I don’t do), I have come to think of these things as “Goals for this Year“. I think that describes best what most people actually do.

Instead, I will make a goal now for six years time. I just turned 34 so in 6 years from now (I’ll give myself plus or minus 6 months) I plan to retire :)

But to do that I need goals. This is a brave decision of mine but I am now planning on setting out the goals now for what I need to have achieved in six years time. The added bonus with these goals is so that I can set other smaller goals along the way.

To make sure my goals are SMART, here’s what they are defined as (along with numerous other variations):

  • S = Specific
  • M = Measurable
  • A = Attainable
  • R = Realistic
  • T = Timely

By the way, I also plan on reviewing these goals every year since otherwise they may be horrendously out of date in a few years time (either due to health, money, technology advances or aliens).

So let’s start.

The Goals

  1. be able to live in/move to a house in which I pay less than $1000/mth to live in
  2. be working for myself, whether that is contracting, earning money from sales, adverts or referrals
  3. have no other debts (apart from my rental house which will be self-sufficient by this year’s end)

Some clarifications necessary.

  1. This includes mortgage, insurance, tax/rates, some maintenance, all bills (electricity, gas, telephone, internet, misc)
  2. ie. have no immediate bosses who say “you must do this“
  3. Apart from my rental house which will be self-sufficient by the end of 2010.

Ok, that’s a first stab. I’m not sure I have covered everything but I think those things are SMART.

What do you think? Are they realistic? Specific? Measurable? Any other suggestions for other goals I may need to consider?

Labels: retiring

Inserted: 2010-01-02 22:34 (8 months ago)

1 Comment

1. bd

Nice goals but why wouldn't you be able to achieve (1) and (2) within the year?

I can see that (3) may be a bit harder, but (1) and (2) ought to be easy enough to do if you work at it. I mean what is 6 years going to give you that this year will not? It's just comfortably vague.

All the best!

Inserted: 2010-02-15 05:08 (6 months, 2 weeks ago)

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