How to Set FIRE Goals and Actually Achieve Them (2026)

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2:11Mindy Jensen:New years means new goals. And today we are doing ours live. Scott and I are looking back on what we've accomplished this year, and we will walk through our goal setting process for 2026 across personal life, professional growth, and financial targets.

2:33Mindy Jensen:Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the BiggerPockets Money Podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen, and with me as always is my loves to set goals co-host, Scott Trench. Thanks, Mindy. Great to be here with my resolute co-host, Mindy Jensen. Like Mindy said, I think setting goals is hugely important. I think that the end of the year is a great time to look at all this progress and look towards next year. You know, I'm so into goal setting that I can't help myself. I actually probably spend way too much time setting and revising and those types of things with goals on there. Consistency and sticking with it every single day is definitely my bigger challenge than having clear goals.

3:05I love it. I can't get enough of it. And I'm excited to talk about it today.

3:08Mindy Jensen:Well, let's jump into it, Scott. Let's recap 2025. 25, what did you accomplish personally, professionally, and financially? On the personal side, we welcomed our newest family member this year. That was not really a accomplishment of mine, but rather of my wife's. Thank you, Virginia. Great job on there. Thank you for all the sacrifice that goes into everything around there from the pregnancy to, I mean, it's just crazy in there. But that's been wonderful to welcome Taylor into the Trench household and see her kind of develop and grow. And she finally moved into her sister's room this week, actually, and that's gone pretty smoothly.

3:45So that's been really fun just watching the family grow. On the personal front, I'll also say as CEO, I was definitely completely obsessed with my work. A lot of the things that you find with like very, you know, career oriented people and the challenges that that provides in their life, those were definitely happening to me in a lot of different areas. And I was able to unwind a lot of those things and really kind of reset into a much better place where I'm much, much healthier in my personal life, my family life, all those kinds of things. All that has just completely done a 180 since this time last year when things were really challenging for me, frankly, in a lot of ways.

4:21On the professional front, this has been just one of the most fun years professionally I've ever had. It's so fun to do this show and to actually have the time to kind of think about, hey, what ought we to talk about on the show. For eight years, we were doing this. I mean, how many times did I show up and I would just arrive like after three hours of straight meetings, you know, and then we'd go right into a recording and I'd kind of have to catch up while we're doing that. And it's so refreshing to be able to do it in a different way right now and actually kind of pour my heart and soul alongside your efforts now into the great content we do here at Bigger Pockets Money on a more part-time to full-time-ish.

4:53Sometimes it's kind of stretch into full-time, but rarely here at Bigger Pockets Money on there. So that's been awesome. Just kind of do that. I've been working on building the skillset of software development, which was never something I could personally do or even really talk through at all. I was totally inept at that this time last year, and that's been really fun. And then on the financial side, I would say the biggest win has been my mindset shift from accumulation to preservation. I don't think I'm in decumulation mode right now, but I don't have to play this aggressive built ramp up my wealth creation game long-term.

5:24I can play a much more defensive game and live off the cash flows of my portfolio. That's been a big transition for me. So those are my wins. How about you, Mindy?

5:32Mindy Jensen:Well, personally, your youngest daughter was born this year. My oldest daughter went off to college this year, and that was quite a big change for our household. We went from four people in the house to three people in the house. She has settled into college out in California and is really loving where she's at. I have been on a weight loss journey. When you're over 50, losing weight can be really difficult. I have lost 30 pounds so far this year with another 20 to go. So that'll be, you know, next year's goal too. Professionally, I am really, really, really loving the continued path at BiggerPockets Money.

6:11Mindy Jensen:We're making great content, Scott. We have more time now that you have stepped away as CEO. We have more time to collaborate on ideas and collaborate on shows ahead of time. You have always been really awesome at just, and I say this with the most love in my heart, showing up to talk instead of putting more of the planning process, being part of the planning process. And now I think we're just even better now that we have your thoughts in the planning process as well. So that's the professional front. Financially, it's been a pretty good year, Scott. We have had some great investments that went really, really well.

6:51Mindy Jensen:Carl and I were able to get into a private equity situation that just doubled its valuation. So our financial position is really becoming a game now. Now it's more of, you know, we've got the baseline financial independence done. We've got, you know, fat fire done. And now it's just a game. Where can we take some investment risks for outsized returns? Because everything's now finalized, you know, everywhere else. I'm also building a house right now doing 0 % of the work. I have an excellent crew building me a house that it's just going so well, knock on wood. And I'm absolutely knocking on my desk on purpose.

7:32Mindy Jensen:I want to knock on that wood because if anybody has done a house build from the ground up, you know that things can change in a heartbeat. But so far it is on time and on budget. So fingers crossed that that continues. In July, Frank Vasquez came on the show and walked me through creating a portfolio, a risk parity portfolio, golden ratio portfolio. I started with $10 ,000 in July. I withdrew$42 in July. Right after we created the account, I pulled$42 out. The reason being$42 is 5 % of the portfolio divided by 12 for the monthly withdrawals. So I could see what was going on monthly. I have withdrawn$42 in July, August, September, October, and November.

8:18Mindy Jensen:I withdraw at the end of the month. So I'm getting ready to make my final withdrawal of the year. My portfolio value is$11 ,002 right at this moment that we're recording. So lots of positions are up. And this is after withdrawing. I have more money than when I started and I've been withdrawing 5 % or the equivalent of 5%. So that's been a fun experiment. I'm excited to see what happens in 2026 there. Sounds like a good year for both of us here. It was a pretty good year. Now, what did you start out the year with from a goals perspective? Honestly, I don't think I set any goals this year. I was in a different place in my life.

8:55Mindy Jensen:And Scott, working on the 31 Days Challenge has given me more clarity on goal setting in general and how I can use goals to encourage myself to get to those goals as opposed to just like, oh, I want to have a good day today. I've never really spent a lot of time on goals before, but I'm really excited to do that this year. How about you? Where did you start at with your goals this year and how'd you end up? Well, let's pull them up from last year. Let's see what I said this time last year. What I wanted to do is I wanted to be a proactive husband and father and create a lot of happy memories, specifically being ready to welcome our incoming baby into the household.

9:35I wanted to set BiggerPockets up for a smooth transition and cheer on the new leadership that was going to come into BiggerPockets. and I wanted to transition my portfolio to passive management so that I could begin to live off of it in a more robust way on a go forward basis. So I generally accomplished all of those goals. And I will also say I layered in after my transition some pretty hardcore fitness goals, which I'm sure we'll talk about as we get in here. I did not accomplish all of those fitness goals on there, but they were kind of absurd goals that really weren't practical, which I'm sometimes guilty of.

10:10So I'm very pleased with my overall progress in the fitness front this year.

10:13Mindy Jensen:And we will be back in just a moment after this quick word from our show sponsors.

10:22Mindy Jensen:Welcome back to the show. Okay, let's let's dive a little bit deeper into that. In November of 2024, you and I had a photo shoot. And at that photo shoot, we weighed the same. Do you mind if I share your weight, Scott? Sure. Go ahead. Okay. So we both weighed 190 pounds. I'm five, four. Scott is how tall are you, Scott? I'm six, one. Yeah. So very different heights. My body should not weigh them as much as Scott's does. And now I have lost 30 pounds. Scott, you have gained 30 pounds. Show you, show your muscles, Scott. Oh yeah. Look at these. Scott's got some guns. I've been really on a weight gain journey.

10:59I bought a Hope gym and a barbell and I've been doing that almost every single, I've done it almost four days a week for almost the last six months. So I've been, I've been, I've been definitely like becoming a meathead here.

11:10Mindy Jensen:But you feel better. Like this is how I know Scott. I met Scott 10 years ago, 11 years ago, when he was some young kid that was still playing rugby on a regular basis, very fit, very into fitness. And as you grew in your corporate job, you're spending more time at work and less time at the gym. So I'm excited to see your new found old fitness level back, Scott. I know that's real important to you. I definitely feel better this way. I've tried a number of things for me having a lot of muscle mass. There's a lot of benefits that seem to go along with it for like mental clarity, thinking, the ability to eat more.

11:49I've always found it very difficult to control my food intake on a long term basis. And having more muscle mass makes that very easy. I actually have to try to eat enough to maintain the muscle mass. So that That means that, you know, there's a room for that 20 % or so of junk to get in there without being a problem on that front. So I still do a good amount of cardio as well. But I just I just find it easier for me to kind of look and feel good or at least the way I think I look good and feel good by having muscle mass. But everyone's different. That's just that's just my personal preference.

12:19And that seems to be working for me now.

12:21Mindy Jensen:Well, yeah, it's it's working great, Scott. You, by the way, look great. Like we meet in person probably once every two weeks. You know, we have one scheduled every week. every other week we probably make it to breakfast. And it's just been incredible seeing Mindy's transformation this year. Yes. I have also joined a gym. I go to F45 if there's any other F45ers out there. I really enjoy the workout because I am not like Scott. I didn't grow up working out and playing every sport. I didn't do any of that. So going to the gym is actually kind of difficult for me because I don't know what I'm doing.

12:54Mindy Jensen:So F45, when you get there, the trainers walk you through the workout that day. It's always a different workout. They walk you through each different station. There's a video screen at the front of the gym that shows you what each station is supposed to be doing in case you forget, which I do a lot. So I don't have to put any thought into my workout. I just show up and do the work, which has prevented me from going to the gym. I mean, I was going to the gym. I've been going to the gym for years and making absolutely zero progress. So seeing progress is so motivating to keep going. Okay, Scott, we've both had a pretty good 2025.

13:31Mindy Jensen:Let's look at your goals for 2026. What has been your historical goal setting process? And what are your goals, personal goals for 2026? You know, as we all know, I am a huge goal setter. I take it super seriously. I love nerding out about it. I think it's foundational to so many good things in life coming your way eventually. I think you get what you want, or at least with the goals you set eventually. In many cases, not everyone will do that, but I think there will be a fairly high percentage of people who, if they are very clear about what they want and work towards it, will get it eventually.

14:05And so I've done this since the moment I graduated college, heavily influenced by one of my neighbors. Shout out to Adam August. Thank you for all you've done for me. Adam is a big goal setter and gave me this journal from the success guru named Darren Hardy called living your best year ever. When I was right when I was graduating college. And I've been fortunate enough to just keep doing that every year. I actually bought a bunch of these journals and handed them out to people over the years, no affiliation with Darren Hardy, just like his stuff. With that evolved to when I got married, Virginia and I went on our honeymoon, we, I made her sit down and, and, and talk about our, our life vision on there and, and kind of brought a draft.

14:39And it was great. We did it for our honeymoon for like, you know, 20, 15, 20 minutes, maybe 30 minutes. And it's so funny looking at that, you know, five, six years later and seeing, yes, there's some differences in there, but what's remarkable is how much of that has stayed the same and how much of that is now actually our reality. And there's lots of privilege and luck that goes into that, but that I also believe that you can't get exactly what you want if you don't know exactly what you want. So an output of that looks kind of like this document I'm showing my screen here. This is the BP money goal setting template.

15:08We tried to distill a free goal setting process. This is just available at biggerpocketsmoney.com slash resources. If you want to download that and try it out, we kind of have this vision. It's just like a one page of a piece of paper that says, here's what our home looks like. And this is an update for this year. It's got our two kids, our handsome kitty cat, Fred. What does our day-to-day lifestyle look like? How are things going? What are our work commitments? What does our weekday look like? What does our week ends look like? What's our community look like? What's our physical fitness? How's our financial position in our situation?

15:42And this is just that one page document and all of our goals derive from this document. So we updated this last quarter and we'll update it again this quarter, every quarter, a sentence or two changes, but it's remarkable again, how much now stays consistent each time we revisit the document. And it's really helpful to ground ourselves in the next quarter goals to make sure that they are derived from this document and making sure that they're continuing to either maintain or improve upon that life vision. So that's where it all starts for Virginia and I and for my goal setting process here on a regular basis.

16:16Mindy Jensen:Scott, I love this document so much that I made it day two of the 31 day challenge that we're doing for our listeners, our audience. If you would like to get a better handle on your entire financial picture, sign up for our 31 day challenge at biggerpocketsmoney.com slash three one D-A-Y-S. It is a free challenge every day. You'll get an email with a task to help you get a better handle on your finances, to help take your finances to the next level. And this document, Scott, when you first showed me this document that you created, I was like, this is amazing. and Carl and I went and sat down outside of our house, completely separate, no distractions and sat down to fill this out.

17:03Mindy Jensen:We didn't get it all done in one day because of course we had other things that we'd said yes to already, but we are so excited to be more in line with each other and just having this conversation, start thinking about the goals that we want. I love this from a five-year perspective, what does your life look like? I got some big goals to accomplish in the next five years and I'm real excited about them. So Scott, what are some of your goals? For 2026, I kind of have four of the categories of goals. They're family, fitness, entrepreneurship in the sense of BiggerPockets money, and then some lifestyle goals.

17:36Notably, this is the first year I do not have a financial goal. I do have some entrepreneurship goals, but I'll share those in a second. Actually, I'll start with those. They're third on my list, but I'll start with them here on the business front. There's kind of three top goals here. One is I really want to build a really high quality suite of DIY financial planning tools for the BiggerPockets community. I think that there's an opportunity for folks to perfect like this concept of a financial plan to distill that and personalize it and build it yourself and then decide if you want to bring that to a financial planner for that extra eye or extra feedback.

18:12But I think that's a really big, the next level for BiggerPockets money listeners. And I think that will help a lot of people. And I think we can pre-populate them, you and I, Mindy, with, you know, 10 or 25 of the most common types of situations we've encountered from BiggerPocketsMoney listeners to give folks a really good starting point on that journey. So I think that's really fun and we'll have a lot of impact. We'll make all of that free. We probably will make money somehow from that with ads or, you know, if you need Monarch money to set your financial position, we have a partnership with them.

18:40But I think that that will be a really powerful outcome for the community. Similarly, I want to learn how to vibe code and code software and I want to build a financial planning software application that's along those same lines. You want to do it on PDF and Excel? Great. You want to do it on a software? Here it is. It's free. And just kind of make all that stuff free. I think that's a really fun project. It's a great kind of like professional output for the thoughts and the skills and the knowledge that you and I have built up over all these years. I think that's a great way to just spit it out into something that could be useful for the world.

19:10And then the last one is to make sure that the business is cashflow positive. and continue to grow on that front. And so that's, those are kind of the three goals for entrepreneurship. Let's go next with my family goals. So I have this kind of goal of a high level of having the best year of marriage with Virginia ever. And that involves a cadence of activity. It's not, so what is this, what is the stuff that needs to happen every week and every day to make that happen? And those kind of spit out to number of trips, our weekly meeting, weekly dates and walks and games and talks. I want to have events with friends, family and neighbors that are pleasant for our whole family.

19:42I want to have regular giggles, full presence at family time with our two little girls. I want to make sure that our girls are developing appropriately. And I want to make sure that household equity is in balance this year. That was something that got way out of balance, especially in the last few years with my job as CEO. And I have a lot of work to do to rectify that imbalance and want to work on that in the course here of 2026 and 2027. So those are kind of my high level family goals. For fitness, I'm not sure if these are absurd or not. So I don't know. I have never actually trained the way I'm training right now.