• Setting Goals
• Creating Awareness
• Defining Financial Freedom
• Forming a Plan

Setting Goals

• What are your hopes and dreams? What do you wish to be, what do you wish to do and what do you wish to have? Yes, these can be difficult questions, but to get the things you wish for unless you first identify those wishes. Only after you have clearly identified what it is you want from your life can you make good decisions regarding money and the role you want it to play.
• Do not shortchange the things you would like to do during your life and with your time. Far too often we concentrate on what we want to have or accomplish, but how we spend our time is so often the real key to having a happy and satisfying life.
• Do not lose sight of today for tomorrow. Look around you at all the people who spend far too many years of their lives overly caught up in working for tomorrow. Today is your life as much as tomorrow, and the best approach for achieving financial freedom is one that creates a balance between the two.
• Far too many people set their goals and dreams lower than they should, settling for far less out of life than they need to. Do not buy into the idea that you need to have a high IQ, a particular education, a lot of money, and such to be successful. Studies have shown again and again that you do not. Take a close look at those who are successful. Often you will find you have just as much going for you as they do or did before they became successful.

Creating Awareness

• What does money really mean to you? Why do you want what you want? In an average day you see, hear, and absorb over six hundred sales messages – over four million attempts to influence how you spend your money by the time you turn twenty-one. These messages are more insidious than you think. Start becoming more aware of these incessant attempts to manipulate what you "want". Once you do, you'll find yourself more in control of how you spend your money and, more importantly, more in control of your life.
• Every expenditure is a trade that requires you to give up something else. These trades are often a lot more than just swapping one possession for another. Sometimes it is a fundamental quality of life trade of things such as your health, your relationships, or enjoying how you spend your day. Always carefully think through what you are trading and whether or not you're making a winning trade.

Defining Financial Freedom

• Save your money so that someday you can retire and live the “good life.” This idea has become entrenched in our society as the cornerstone of long-term financial and life planning. Well, right here and now I ask you to challenge that idea. For most people it is a bad goal and a misguided life plan. Why should you have to wait until you are sixty-five before you can live the life you wish? Replace the R-word, retirement, with two new ones: financial freedom. This is the goal to pursue.
• Financial freedom means being able to work at what you want, when you want, live where you want, and to have it a lot sooner than sixty-five. You can make this happen. If you don’t think so, the only person standing in your way is you.
• There are two ways to accomplish financial freedom: Either possess the money you need to be totally free to do whatever you want; or possess enough money to be able to earn less and live a better life a heck of a lot sooner. The second approach will get you free faster. (You can also always plan toward total freedom and change your mind along the way.)

Forming a Plan

• You must have a written spending and saving plan that allows you to compare your actual spending to your plan each month. If you do nothing else, you absolutely must know how you spend your money. This is a necessary tool for reaching the kind of financial freedom you would like.
• In order to make good long-term financial-planning and investment decisions, you need to understand the true impact on your plans of taxes, inflation, compounding, and the rate of return you are likely to get on your investments.
• If you are approaching retirement and don't have enough saved, delaying your retirement for a few more years can often go a long way toward solving any shortfalls, as it both preserves and adds to your assets. You may also find that a decision to continue working, either full-time or part-time, often provides a better overall quality of life.
• Check out the advice topic: Spending and Saving Plan Help.