What are some of the goals you’ve set over the last year? The last five years? Being 100% honest, are you on track to achieve any of those goals? As you look over the last ten years, what’s your track record for setting and achieving even your smallest goals? Experience tells me that very few people achieve their goals. Whether their goal is to lose weight, reduce debt, get in shape, buy a house, go back to school, increase income, build a side business, or accomplish some other challenge, it doesn’t matter. Most people do not achieve their goals. The worst part is that each time you set a goal and fail to achieve it, the negative experience damages your self-esteem and self-confidence. After all, how can failing to achieve an important goal not negatively affect you? You can tell yourself it’s no big deal, but deep down inside you know the truth. If you continue along the path of setting goals you know you aren’t going to achieve, then you fall into despair and suddenly find yourself accepting your reality as your fate, your lot in this life. Enough unmet challenges and you will change your personality to match your surroundings… When people continually fail to achieve their goals, they stop dreaming and no longer believe they can achieve anything worthwhile. Then, like millions of other people, they aimlessly drift through life simply accepting it as it comes to them without trying to alter the course at all… Sadly, the best of us, the smartest of us, the ones who have the most to offer often just give up…
I firmly believe that you can achieve any goal that is truly important to you. You just need learn the keys of setting and planning your attack on your goals and then use discipline to achieve them…
I know I talk incessantly about goals on this blog… More often than not, they are health and fitness, or music related… So I thought I would switch gears and talk about some financials for a change… Again, not an expert, just my experience from doing research on my problems and how I solved them…
Now, everyone who reads this blog knows that I had a massive car accident that changed the course of my life in a single afternoon… New to California, I was celebrating a recently secured job with Haliburton as a computer analyst on a drilling rig and out enjoying the Memorial Day weekend with my family and in an instant I’m being cut out of a car by an emergency crew and found myself in a hospital room with a shattered family, shattered body, and a shattered life… After fifteen years of surgery, patterns of joblessness, addiction to opioid drugs and generally just wandering through life trying to recover, my financial situation was so fucked up, I accepted it as permanent, and it became a joke to me. After so long with school loans in default, inability to hold a job, credit cards in default, zero assets, multiple overdrafts in my bank accounts, and living from paycheck to paycheck, I accepted my 460 credit score as what it was, permanent… How could I escape it? It was so bad that I never even looked at it, and in fact even know how to check it… I mean seriously, what would be the fucking point? The only time I ever knew what it was is when I went to a credit place to buy a couch and the salesperson would tell me that the only way I could get the couch on credit was to accept a 33% interest rate but “It would help my credit…”
So I just quit… 460 was my joke… I stopped caring… Why waste my time… Then the school loan people started calling me… They enquired weekly about my status, telling me that it was going to affect my credit if I didn’t find some way to pay off $32,000 in school loans… I laughed and asked them “What are you gonna do, take my birthday because it’s all I have left?”
I had no job, no money, no way to fix the situation…
Its classic isn’t it? You have shitty credit, so they charge you higher rates of interest… In order to fix it, you need more money, but they take all of it, so it becomes this weird cyclic construct that you cannot escape… You need more money and to do that you need a better job but to do that you either need to be really lucky or go back to school, but you can’t go back to school because your school debts are in default and on, and on, and on… You’re always one automotive breakdown from absolute disaster…
I would fix it, if I could fix it, But I can’t fix it, so fuck it… 460 credit score? Well hardee har har ain’t that fucking hilarious?
Then, well I got pissed off… I wanted to fix it, but I needed to formulate a long term plan to do it… What if I wanted to return to school? I couldn’t… What if I needed a loan? Nope, not unless I could find a loan shark… I changed my mind and 460 wasn’t funny, it as my nemesis, my enemy… 460 went from being funny to being like Ricardo Montalban as Khan was to Captain Kirk… I had to figure it out… I saw stories all the time where people had dug out from worse situations and I didn’t think of myself as stupid in any way, shape or form… Crazy? Maybe? Mentally ill? Definitely, but there had to be an escape route here somewhere…
So, I started looking around… Sounds fucking crazy right? A jobless, broke, financially clueless house husband with a 460 credit score wants to figure out how to get that score above 800 and stabilize his $32,000 school loans…
Long term goal? Yeah, it took five years…
I called the people holding my loans and asked if there was any way I could fix this with no money and no job… My first break came when I got ahold of a great call center woman who told me that school loans in default could be fixed with “loan rehabilitation” programs… She hooked me up with some people who specialized in loan rehab, and for a year I paid $5 a month to get them out of default…
Now wait though… Long term goals need a complex construct… When I started my Loan Rehab Program, I knew that as soon as I finished my year, my loan payments would shoot up to $250 a month and I certainly didn’t have that yet so I called back and asked some questions and they said at the end of the process, I could enroll in school again or put them into forbearance for up to 18 months…
Light at the end of the tunnel…
Now I won’t bore you with the rest of the financial self-rescue story but today my credit scores are 762 and 757 respectively and still climbing… This weekend I got a mattress with no money down and zero interest for 60 months because my credit was so good…
Things can be fixed, no matter what the situation, no matter what the obstacles… So using my example as a case of success, I’m going to give you some pointers to achieve your own personal success in planning long term goals…
Pretty sweet, right?
1. If it has been a while since you followed through on anything, start by setting small short-term goals. Every time you set and achieve a goal, your confidence and sense of competence increases. Start your journey by setting small achievable goals and then taking the steps necessary to achieve them. As you build your confidence in achieving small goals, you will believe you can achieve big goals.
EXAMPLE: I achieved this by doing small things like planning to drink more water, journaling daily... These small goals realized made me more confident that I could achieve bigger things...
2. Set goals that are important to you. Let’s be honest, to achieve any meaningful goal requires you to do things you would prefer not doing. If your goal is not HIGHLY important to you, you won’t do what’s required of you to achieve it. The obstacles in your path won’t be worth overcoming because the prize isn’t important enough.
EXAMPLE: My long term goal of fixing my finances included a return to school. That was very important to me and while that changed over time, my reasons to repair my finances changed, but the goal of fixing them did not.
3. Identify the largest obstacles to your biggest goals. When you look at your goal, ask yourself, “What will be required of me to achieve this goal? What will be the biggest obstacles I will have to overcome?” Make a list of all the things you will need to do and challenges you will likely face.
EXAMPLE: My long term goal list and plan included all the things in my way like no job, no clue, and no money…
4. Ask, “Am I willing to do what’s required?” This is the time when you need to be honest and ask yourself one more time, “Is this goal important enough to me that I will make the sacrifices necessary and do what is required of me every day to achieve my goal?”
EXAMPLE: I HATED calling people on the phone and consequently despised asking anyone to do anything for me. I had to decide if I was willing to be on the phone, ask questions, ask for help and navigate a situation I was very uncomfortable with. Not just weekly, but daily for quite a long time. Was I willing to fill out the paperwork, pursue the avenues and find my way out?
5. Perhaps most importantly, put together your plan and break it down into daily activities and smaller goals. If you are going to achieve any worthwhile goal you must know what you should be doing each day or at the every least, at each stage of the operation..
EXAMPLE: When I set a goal in 2015 to turn my 460 credit score into an 800 credit score, I knew how many calls I would need to make every day. If I fell behind one day, I made it up the next day.
6. Work your plan. Once you know the actions you need to take every day, you must use your personal initiative and discipline to do what you know you should do, even when you don’t feel like doing it. This is when your resolve to overcome those obstacles you knew you would face will be tested.
EXAMPLE: I am goal oriented and when things didn’t go my way, I could feel the frustration and despair rising up in me and I simple reviewed my list of things that I knew I would face, owned up to the struggle and kept trying.
7. Hold yourself accountable. The truth is no one is going to hold you accountable to your goals. It’s your life and these are your goals. You know what you should be doing, and now it’s your responsibility to hold yourself accountable to working your plan and refusing to allow excuses.
EXAMPLE: When I would request to have paperwork sent to me, it was up to me to fill them out, get them notarized, copies, signatures, etc… My plan required my time. If I got something in the mail, it became a priority.
8. Lastly, enjoy the ride... You're going to have small victories along the way and come up against shit you didn't even imagine would happen... People will help you and people will hinder you but all of that is unimportant... Every day is a puzzle to put together the picture you are imagining in your mind... Whether it is financial stability, learning to paint or sculpting your abs... This is your life and your dream, make that shit happen...
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So listen, this blog is about long term goals and this financial situation of mine is just an example… You can apply this to anything you want. Large weight loss, running a marathon, buying a house, a new car, or anything that takes a massive amount of effort and time.
Start small, think big… If a jobless, broke guy with a 460 credit score and defaulted school loans can do it, so can you.
I am very protective of my financial stability now. If I want to return to school in the future, I now have that option. If I need to borrow money, I now have that option… My life is not controlled by my circumstances anymore…
1. Write down your goal
2. Break it into manageable parts
3. Commit
4. Get started
The 90 Day Life Change Challenge update... I crushed this morning... Up at 0455, broke my 1/2 Murph record by 47 seconds, 170 Squats and P90X3 Agility... A very sweaty, satisfying morning routine... Looking forward to the day... Sleeping like a baby with a full belly again... All the broken sleep from caffeine, alcohol and drugs seems to be fading away... I keep looking for a peak in feeling good... Damn, why didn't I do this years ago? hahahaha!
Have a day that you intended to have... I will see you tomorrow, Love you like a possum loves playing dead... Hmmm... How very Wednesday Addams of me... I like it...
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