Real Estate Investor Magazine South Africa September 2015 | Page 66

LESSONS

The Secret to Achieving Your

Financial Goals
Tips and tricks to guide your financial planning
BY VANGILE MAKWAKWA

I

’ve recently embarked on a life changing journey
to becoming a suitcase entrepreneur (again) and
living in a different country every 3 months. This
is my gift to myself after achieving a major financial
goal - becoming debt free and paying off US$60,000
(ZAR600, 000) debt in 4 years. This is a huge milestone
for me and it’s got me wondering: What’s the secret
behind achieving financial goals and turning dreams
into reality?
A 1979 study asked Harvard MBA graduates the
following question: “Have you set clear, written goals
for your future and made plans to accomplish them?”

life. At the time this 5 year plan seemed impossible but
I figured I would make up my own exercises and deal
with my insecurities as I went along.
Taking constant action to fufuil your personal goals
Seeing my vision written down, made me realized that
if I wanted things to happen, I needed to take constant
action. I wrote down action steps and dealing with my
self esteem and self doubt issues on a daily basis. So far
I’ve achieved 55% of the goals I wrote down in 2010.
Most of the goals I’ve achieved in the last 4 years are
actually things I thought were impossible (like owning
my own property!), so the journey for me has been one
of self awareness and self confidence.

The study found that:

Focus your energy on a maximum of 5 goals

• Only 3% of the students had written goals and
plan
• 13% had goals but they weren’t in writing
• 84% had no goals at all

So with that in mind, I’ve written 4 personal finance/
career goals for 2015:

Ten years later the same group of students were
interviewed and the results were fascinating:
• 13% of the class who had goals, but didn’t write
them down were earning twice the amount of
money that the 84% who had no goals were
earning
• The 3% who’d written down their goals were
earning, on average, ten times as much as the
other 97% of the class combined!
The importances of creating and writing down
personal goals
Writing my goals down was a game changer for me.
Tom Ferry 2010 book titled “Life! By Design”, about
the power of visualization and writing down your
vision, inspired me to write down a 5 year vision for my
64

SEPTEMBER 2015 SA Real Estate Investor

1. Meditate 2 hours a day
2. Enrol 1,000 students to the Creating Money
Magic eCourse
3. Get paid to speak and facilitate 8 workshops and/
or events internationally
4. Focus on creating content on savings and
investment to help as many people as possible
start investment portfolios in 2015 (wealth
creation)
Writing you goals down holds you accountable and is
the first step to taking action. Whether or not the goals
materialise within the set time period, doesn’t matter,
what matters is that you can always go back and see
how far you’ve come.
I leave you a quote by Brian Tracy who says,
“Committing your goals to paper increases the
likelihood of your achieving them by one thousand
percent!”
www.reimag.co.za