How To Create A Simple And Effective Life Plan

A Life Plan is the foundation for your financial plans, driving how you need to spend, save, and invest in order to improve the likelihood of accomplishing your life goals. 

It’s exciting and fun to strategize your finances around your life instead of the other way around, so read on to discover the three critical steps of creating a simple and effective Life Plan.

Step 1: Get Inspired

Daydreaming may seem like an idle pastime, but defining your aspirations is a real and valid component to planning your life. What gets your mind racing and your heart pumping? When you envision the best possible version of your life, what do you see? 

Creating a vision board can be a powerful exercise in defining how you want your future to look, as can thinking about the legacies and accomplishments of the people you most admire.

As your dreams become clearer, ask yourself why you feel like they’re worth pursuing. Understanding the motivations behind your dreams will help fuel the likelihood of following through, even when you face resistance and obstacles along the way.

Step 2: Take Action

After articulating your dreams, the next step is breaking them down into clear, actionable goals. Goals are dreams with a deadline. Goal setting is the exciting process of connecting the compass to the clock because good goals are time-bound, giving you a target to aim for and a finish line to chase. 

Assess your goals to see if they’re S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measureable, Ambitious, Realistic, and Time-bound), and then jot them down. The simple act of writing down goals creates a 42% greater chance of accomplishing them. That’s a huge impact! 

We advise building your plan one goal at a time so you don’t get overwhelmed and can focus on the individual steps that you’re taking.

Step 3: Track Progress

What happens when you combine action with tracking? You get traction. Bad pun aside, tracking your progress is key to success. Any goal or dream worth achieving is going to take time to accomplish, and keeping a record of your progress will motivate you to stay on course and allow you to celebrate how far you’ve come. 

Sharing your goals (without necessarily sharing financial data) with a trusted friend or sponsor is great way to add accountability to your plan. You’ll receive cheers when you advance and encouragement when challenges arise, providing more motivation to track your progress.