Goals Rough Draft

Well I have been thinking a lot about some of the financial goals for myself and I think I will just list them all here and decide which one's to fine tune and set for myself on this blog. Accumulate $100,000 in retirement savings by the time I am 30 years old I like this goal because one it is a nice BIG round number that would give me a sense of pride and accomplishment. Also it would put me in pretty good shape for the rest of the longer term goals I have for myself. The only problem with this goal is I think at first glance it might not be attainable as I have slacked so far, but I am going to leave it for now and unless further analysis reveals its truly not attainable will likely leave this as is. Accumulate $10,000,000 by the time I am retired This obviously is a longer term goal and would be the culmination of all of the other goals I have set for myself. I'll do research to see what I need to actually do to get to this point, obviously there are a lot of IFs as it involves something that might be as long as 40 years away, but I think its a good positive long term goal. Reach $1,000,000 in my retirement accounts by the time my oldest kid starts college This goal I just recently came up with, but again think it is an excellent goal to shoot for. First off if I am going to get to $10M by the time I retire the sooner I get to $1M the better. My oldest and only kid currently is just 7 months old so that leaves me just over 17 years to essentially go from scratch to $1 million dollars. This is a very aggressive goal, but if set out a good framework and have a fair amount of success investing I believe this one is probably my most attainable goal so far. Become financially independent early enough in life so that I can truly enjoy my kids. Here is where I might have some conflict with the $10 million dollar goal. I was doing some math while day dreaming during lunch the other day (that's when I came up with the $1M by the time my son enters college goal). Well I figured if I had $1M by the time I was 43-44 years old that would alleviate any worries I had about saving for retirement - IE I could quit saving for retirement completely and still end up pretty comfortable. This would allow me to do the following if I so chose

• Stop saving for retirement completely and use that money that money instead to help support my kids college education.
• Start an early-retirement and find a job that had very liberal time commitments that would allow me to spend much more time with my family.
• Quit my day job and try to start my own business (granted this is 17 years down the road but I got loads of ideas for low-time/ low-capital requirement/internet businesses. I've got a pretty strong entrepreneurial spirit, just I am more concerned about getting my ducks in a row now while I am young before I fall flat on my face attempting one of my hair-brained ideas. Once I am in my 40s income will be less important to me (yeah I know kids and college aren't cheap, but I'll discuss this in a separate post).

Help family or good friends learn more about the power of money and how to harness for themselves. I've got 3 sisters, 6 brother-in-laws, 4 sister-in-laws, 4 nephews and 6 nieces. My three sisters are all older than me, but the other 20 nephews/nieces/brother&sister-in-laws are all younger than me and I think for those that are interested I could use my experiences thus far to help them get on a good track even earlier than I did and achieve goals that are much greater than mine. I've already got one nephew who seems to be pretty interested in investing and he is only a sophomore in college. It would be nice to have him become a successful investor also and then we could do all kinds of fun things together and not have to worry about the money aspect. This is kind of a soft goal, but I'm going to set a short term goal of getting my nephew to open a Roth IRA account before his senior year of college. Find room to set up college savings accounts for my children This may sound bad, but my kid's college fund really are taking a back seat to my retirement savings. In fact I have contemplated completely ignoring their college savings entirely. Partly due to trying to sore up my retirement by the time they enter college that way I can just change the financial spigot from my retirement saving to their college savings if the need be. The other reason is that they can get jobs, take out student loans, and really in the big scheme of things it won't set them that far back. Look at me I have $50,000 in student debt yet I have plans to be a multi-millionaire. Regardless my state's 529 plan allows me to contribute $3,000 per year per child tax deductible and that money grows tax-free and I can withdraw it tax-free. That is just incredible and is probably something I won't want to pass up. Regardless my family lives on my income alone and I honestly don't have the resources currently to achieve my retirement goals and my kids college goals. Well that's enough for tonight. I'll do further research into these goals and hopefully we can get something set in stone by this weekend.