Why You Keep Failing at Money Goals (And the Simple System That Fixes It)

22:25Don't let the size of the goal intimidate you. Instead, what I want you to do is we're going to think about this in small actions that we can take every single year. So let's say, for example, that you want to read a book every single week. And every single week this year, in 2026, you want to read one book. That's 52 books in a given year. That is an incredible goal. But when you say, I'm going to read 52 books this year, that sounds like it is a daunting task. But let me show you when you break this down, how really it's not a daunting task at all. You start with the big goal, which is 52 books per year.

22:58Then we break it down by month. Well, I need to read four to five books every single month, depending on how many weeks are in that given month. Then you break it down by weeks. I need to read one book every single week. And then you break it down by days. And so we think about this and say, well, how many pages will you read today? We're going to take the book that you're currently reading. You're going to look at the number of pages on that book and divide it by seven. Why? There are seven days in a given week. and all of a sudden, that's how many pages you're going to read today. So if you have a 300-page book divided by 7, that's 43 pages per day.

23:26If you do those action steps by the end of the week, you finish your first book and you are, week one, accomplishing your goal. Here's the cool thing. Success is literally that simple if you just stick to your plan. If you just set up the steps that you needed to do every single day and take those daily actions, you can absolutely accomplish your goal. If you know you want to take a day off every single week from reading and you know, you know, Sundays I'm watching football or Sundays I'm going to brunch with my friends or Sundays I usually am busy with kid stuff and I'm not gonna read that day, then guess what?

23:56Just divide it by six, but know what circumstances happen in your life and be realistic about this. Because if you're trying to stretch your discipline, it is not gonna happen. You gotta make sure that you are instead realistic about what you were trying to do. Now let's think about it the same way as saving money. Let's say again that you wanna save$3 ,000 over the course of the next three months. Well, if that's the case, break it down by month. Well, I need to save$1 ,000 every single month. Break it down by week. Well, I need to save$250 every single week, then break it down by day. And once you start to do these micro chunks, it's gonna help you dramatically realize that you can accomplish these goals and you can absolutely do this.

24:35Now, if that daily goal or that weekly goal or that monthly goal is too much of a stretch where you don't have enough cash on hand to be able to save there, then you need to do two things. One, you need to decide, well, how am I gonna make it up? How am I going to make up the difference if I really want to accomplish this goal? Or two, you need to change that goal and adjust it to a more realistic number. And that is the way that we need to think about this and how we can accomplish these goals. Now, a lot of times I will stretch my goals when it comes to financial things, and I will find a way to accomplish it in between.

25:03And I do this for business too. So the same thing goes for business. I will say to myself, well, if you want to build a business, I just helped somebody do this the other day. They have a business where they have specific clients come in, an aesthetics business, where they have clients come in. And they needed to make X amount of dollars every single month. And in fact, to pay all their bills, all they needed to do was make$1 ,000 every single month to pay all their business bills, their overhead, their rental space, all that kind of stuff. Then they wanted to make an additional$3 ,000 to$4 ,000 so they could live their lifestyle.

25:32Well, in order to do this, we can figure out how many clients you need in order to break this down. And so we went backwards and figured out, okay, well, every single client usually spends about$100 every single month. Well, all we need is to try to attract at least 40 clients per month. And she's working three days a week. So three and a half clients per day. And so she's working three days a week. And so we broke it down by day on how many clients she needs per day. And then we built a marketing plan around that. And so when you break it up into these daily actionable chunks, it makes accomplishing your goals so much easier.

26:04So here's the big lesson I want you to understand from this step is don't leave your future to chance. Success isn't something you stumble into. Success is something you design and you can design your own success, whether it's financial, health, business, it doesn't matter what it is. You can design your own success by just working backwards. It just takes the proper planning. And people who plan in this way are the people who are most successful. The millionaires you know are the ones who are planning through these processes throughout the week and they have these systems in place. Now, I'm going to show you, it doesn't take that long to do all of this.

26:37When you set all this up, you know what you want to accomplish this year. You know the goals that you have. Maybe it's to max out your Roth IRA. Maybe it's to max out your 401k. Maybe it's to finally fund that emergency fund. It doesn't matter what that goal is. We just need to work on this and work backwards towards this. So your discipline is the bridge between your goals and accomplishment. And so when you think about this, I want you to think about, well, how do I stay disciplined? I just make sure I have the daily actions that I know I need to do every single day. And if I do those things, I'm going to accomplish my goal.

27:04So that's number three is making sure that we break them down to the small chunks. Number four is we're going to learn how to keep score next. Tax season is funny because for a lot of people, it is the one time of the year where you actually sit down and look at your full financial picture, your income, your spending, your savings, maybe even your investments. And when you see it all together, you start asking different questions. Am I actually making progress with my money? Simplify your finances with Monarch. Monarch is the all-in-one personal finance tool designed to make your life easier. It brings your entire financial life, budgeting, accounts and investments, net worth, and financial planning together in one dashboard on your phone or laptop.

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30:34I start to clean out closets. I start to clear out the garage and getting things organized again. And every year it makes me think about the bigger stuff too. Not just spring cleaning my house, but cleaning up my long-term to-do list. And one of the things is protecting the life that we built. And that responsibility can feel heavy. Making sure your family would be okay financially if something happened to you isn't exactly a fun task, but it's an important one. And that's where Policy Genius comes in. See, Policy Genius isn't an insurance company. They're an online marketplace that helps you compare life insurance quotes from some of America's top insurers side-by-side for free.

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31:46And progress measurement is one of the most important things when it comes to goal setting. And we have a very specific system that I'm going to teach you here on how to measure your progress. And you absolutely have to measure your progress to figure out exactly where you stand. Imagine watching a football game, for example, and they didn't keep score. They just kept playing back and forth, but they were not keeping score. And every time someone scores, you didn't know if they were winning or losing. The same goes for your goals. If you don't keep track or you don't keep score, you're going to have no idea where you stand.

32:14And so it's very important to have a system into place to make sure we are tracking and keeping score. Now, keeping score helps keep you aware, and it allows you to stay on top of those goals. If you're aware that you're behind on a specific goal, let's say, for example, you're looking to increase your income and you're in sales, and you're supposed to make 60 phone calls every single day, and you know that if you make 60 quality phone calls every single day, then you're going to be able to make$200 ,000 per year. And so you decide, okay, I'm going to make those 60 phone calls every single day, and if you don't track this, if you don't understand how many phone calls you actually made, you'll have no idea where you stand, where if you're starting to fall behind on your goal, you'll never be able to go and look back and see, oh, wow, I didn't make enough phone calls over the course of the last two weeks.

32:59That's why I'm falling behind. So you need to make sure that you have a scoreboard and a way to track your progress towards those goals. And by the way, in Master Your Money Goals, in the workshop, the free workshop on the 14th, I'm going to show you the exact scoreboard that I use, and I'm going to give it to you for free in that workshop. So if you're interested in that, make sure you check that out. Now, creating a scorecard is not a nice to have thing. It is a must have if you want to be serious about accomplishing your goals. Now, my scorecard specifically isn't like a dusty document that I look at once a year.

33:28I'm looking at this every single week. And sometimes I'm looking at it multiple times a week. And that's the key. Tracking your goals isn't a one time event. What a lot of people do is they write down their goals. They put it in their notes app. They put it on a document. All of a sudden, they don't look at it for the rest of the year. Maybe they look at it a couple of times in January. And then all of a sudden, December rolls around and they can't even find that document. and they look at it and the last date it was opened was January 17th, 2025. That, my friends, is a problem. We need to make sure that instead we are accomplishing these goals and we are looking at our scorecard over and over and over again.

34:01Number one is the way you build your own scorecard. And again, I'm going to give you my exact one in the Master Your Money Goals workshop, but it is define your metrics, meaning what are you going to track? So for financial goals, it may be your savings rate. It may be your investment contributions. It may be your debt pay down and how much you're putting towards debt, or it may be some of your spending categories, but what exactly are you going to track? For example, in our sales example that I just gave, that person would be tracking how many phone calls they make. If you're trying to get in shape, you're tracking how many workouts you have make.

34:31If you're trying to get in shape and you want to do seven workouts per week, you're tracking your workouts. Number two is you need to set your check-in intervals. So no matter what, you need to check in on the scorecard at a specific interval. And now I don't really care the frequency of this, but it needs to be at least a monthly frequency. Now for me, I'm going to tell you exactly what I do. So I look at my scorecard on Sundays and every Sunday I go back and I do my weekly review. And I'm going to go through my weekly planning review in master your money goals in more detail, but I'll go through and look at my scorecard.

35:03In addition to looking at my time blocking week, and I'll look at my goals and I'll say, listen, I'm behind on this specific goal. I need to make sure I time block more time in order to achieve that goal. And then I'll put it into my calendar. So it actually dictates what my actions are going to be throughout the week. And this is how you actually accomplish goals is you let your goals and your scorecard help you figure out what actions you need to be taking throughout the week. And then if you're way ahead, then maybe you can reduce some of the time spent on some of those goals. But you have to make sure that you are prioritizing reviewing this at some sort of cadence, whether it's monthly, whether it's weekly, whether it's bi-weekly.

35:42But if you let it go beyond monthly, then you're really not serious about your goals. I know a lot of people who are very good at setting and achieving goals who look at this daily and they'll look at it every single day and make sure that they are moving towards their goals. Weekly is perfect for me. It's what I found and I do it every single Sunday during my Sunday review. And then the third thing I would highly recommend is to make it visual. So for me, I make it visual on a spreadsheet where we look at this and we have it in a table and you can see which goals you're accomplishing and you can check off the box that you accomplished it that month.

36:11And we do it throughout the entire 12 weeks of goal setting. Maybe you have an app that you use or a journal that you use, but make it something that you can see. Make the numbers something that show that you're making progress in one specific direction because visualization and being able to see exactly the progress you're making is gonna keep you motivated and disciplined moving forward. Find ways to visualize your goals. So this is why a lot of charities or a lot of other companies, when they are setting up a specific financial goal, they'll have that red thermometer that they're starting to color in.

36:42This is a visual representation of the progress towards that goal. And this really has worked for decades and decades and decades. And so I want you to find what's your red thermometer? What is your way that you are going to see what the progress is towards actually accomplishing your goal? Now, when you review this scorecard, I want you to turn tracking into a habit. This is a habit that you just do at a specific frequency every single week. and you're going to say, am I ahead or behind is the first question you're going to ask yourself. Well, if you are, then what's working and what needs adjusting?

37:11Just because you're not accomplishing your goals perfectly doesn't mean you can't accomplish that goal. Sometimes we just need to make tweaks and adjustments and reviewing regularly allows us to make those tweaks without having to panic and freak out every single time. So I am a big proponent of just slow movement when it comes to your finances. You've heard me talk about this when reducing your spending, Just reduce one category slowly over time. You've heard me talk about this when it comes to increasing your investing. Just increase it 1 % every single month until it feels painful. You've heard me talk about this even when I'm thinking about retirement planning, where you're adjusting your retirement plan slightly every single year instead of every decade where you're making these drastic changes.

37:48I am all about turning up and boiling that frog slowly instead of doing it all at once. Why? Because it's less painful and it's a lot easier to deal with your situation. The same thing goes for your goals. If you need to adjust your goals, you need to just slowly do it. And so more frequent review is really, really helpful for me. Now, if you're the type of person that knows, I'm not gonna look at this every week because you know your own psychology, you know your own habits, you know how you work. If you're the person that says, I'm just not gonna review this every week, I know I'm not. It's just not gonna happen, Andrew.

38:21Don't even ask me to do it every single week. I'll do it once a month if I have to, but I'm not gonna do it every week. That's fine. But you gotta make sure that you have a system in place to review and ask yourselves those questions. The more you review it, honestly, the better off you're going to be. And so for some people, I know they even will print off their scorecard. They'll keep it on their desk. They'll put it on their mirror at home so they can think about it pretty frequently. Here's the thing is you can't win the game if you don't know the score. And this is the scorecard is going to help you progress throughout your entire life.

38:49And so having that scorecard in place is very, very important. Now, step five is, and I alluded to this earlier, but it is weekly planning. And so what I do is I plan out my week on Sundays. And again, I'm recording this episode on a Monday right now. I planned out my entire week yesterday. So I went on my computer. I went through my scorecard. I looked at the things that I needed to accomplish and some of the big goals that I had. And then I went into Google Calendar and I went into my time blocking sequence and I started to time block out my entire week. And so I thought about my goals. I went through there and I went to make sure that I had the right things in place.

39:26Success begins with a plan. And the best time, in my opinion, to plan is before the week begins. So I call it my Sunday ritual. I do it on Sunday because I can either, you know, kind of be flexible, you know, do it in the mornings or if I want to do it in the evening and I didn't have enough time early in the day, I can do it in the evening as well. But this sets the tone for the week and this sets the tone for exactly where you stand. Honestly, not having a plan in place for me, not having my time blocked out every single week is exhausting because then I'm just running around like a chicken with my head cut off and not able to accomplish anything.

39:56but instead if you have a plan in place, you know what you're gonna be doing in every hour, every minute of every single day, all of the sudden you actually feel energized. I feel so much better knowing that I have my time blocked out and I know what's next. So if you've ever suffered from just running around all over the place, always feeling stressed about your time, I highly recommend that you follow this ritual and time block. Again, we'll talk even more about the Sunday ritual in the Master Your Money Goals webinar, but I would highly recommend that you try this time blocking technique because it's very, very important to do this.

40:29So here's the importance of making sure that you do this right, okay? It's number one is setting aside the time to plan. So I chose Sunday. If you think you can plan on Mondays or Saturdays or you like Fridays, then plan it any which way you think is gonna work for you. I just know Sundays, I'm gonna have a little more time most likely than most other days. My businesses don't have people calling me all the time. And so there's just a lot less going on on a Sunday than would be on other days. And so I know I can carve out the 15 minutes I need in order to get my planning done. It's also at the beginning of the week, right before the week hits the ground running on Monday.

41:04And so when I walk in on Monday, I know exactly what I'm going to be doing and I can really, really hit the ground running. So it's very important that you make sure you think about this. In fact, I'll tell you one of my big productivity goals for this year is to never miss a time blocking day. Last year, I had some really busy days where I would try to time block out the entire week and there'd be some holes where I would leave some openings. And when I had those openings within my calendar, guess what happened? Every single time they got wasted on things that were not my priority. So instead, I wanna make sure I never have any holes throughout the week and I time block everything.

41:37So that is gonna be a big key for me in 2026. And I highly recommend that every single person think about it that way. I want 365 days of full on time blocking. Two is when you are going through your ritual, your weekly ritual, I call it my Sunday ritual, But then you want to make sure that you are reviewing your goals. So going through your goals, making sure you're progressing, making sure you're actually accomplishing those goals, and you're moving towards the actual thing that you want to be doing. Number three is once you're reviewing your goals, then you can time block those priorities. So then you can go in there, you can choose your time block, and think about this.

42:11So let's say, for example, you want to ensure that your most important tasks are getting done first. And so you could think, okay, Monday morning, you're focused on strategic planning, and that's what you want to do. or Tuesday afternoon, you want to think about deep work on a key project, then you can put that in there. Thursday evening, you want to make sure you have family time. Maybe you have family movie night or whatever else. And so you want to make sure you're prioritizing that kind of stuff. And by planning this way, it makes sure that all your big priorities get put into your calendar first, and then you can fill all of the rest in.

42:38This also helps when people say, hey, you're free for a quick 15 minute meeting. You know what? Look at your calendar. No, I'm not free for that quick 15 minute meeting. If you want to get on my calendar, here are some of the open areas. And you can even put on your calendar, this is something I have learned over time, is you can put a slot meetings. And so a lot of times for me specifically, when it comes to meetings, I will work backwards. So I will do the latest time of the day is when my first meeting will begin. So if I wanna leave the office at 5 p.m., then 4.30 is my first meeting. That's when I will take my first meeting for that specific day so I can get all the main other stuff done.

43:13And so if you work backwards on your calendar from things that are wasteful like meetings, then you can ensure that you can really nail this. Now, number four is when I plan out my week, I plan for flexibility. So before I was just leaving it as an open time block. Instead, what we're gonna do is we're gonna plan for this flexibility and build it in. So I'm gonna leave some flexibility within my time blocks. Maybe they're 15 minute increments or spots where we can have these breaks that allow us, if we get interrupted, which happens a lot, but if we get interrupted, then we can make sure that we still have ample time to accomplish everything we wanna accomplish in that given day.

43:47And then number five, who's one big thing is I would highly encourage you to include personal development. Reading books, listening to podcasts like this, or taking courses, learning more about skills and specific things that you wanna do out there. That is gonna be a great place. Just make sure you time block a little bit of that in addition to obviously fitness and health stuff so that you don't just spiral out of control and don't prioritize those things. So if you don't know what frequency you should do, I highly recommend and challenge you to set aside some time to plan every Sunday. Just do it exactly what I do and see if your life doesn't improve over that timeframe.

44:20It doesn't take a long time. Usually it takes about 15 minutes. In some weeks, it's taken even less than that because I know exactly what I wanna be doing. But you can plan out your entire week and think about this in a much better way. Now in the workshop, I'm gonna give you the scorecard, but I'm also gonna give you my planning ritual time blocking spreadsheet. This is what I use a lot of times when I want some clarity. When I want to reevaluate my weeks and say, hey, these weeks are spiraling out of control. I feel like I'm not being as productive as I should be. Then I use this time blocking spreadsheet to re-center my entire structure so that I know exactly where I need to be.

44:55And so it'll have the days of the week and ways that you can time block and think about this. And I separate all the tasks by professional, business, and personal so that I know exactly what those tasks are and where they need to land. So it helps me plan this out, plan my perfect day that I call it. And so usually I will look at this and plan out my perfect days so that I can recenter and get back on track to exactly where I need to go. I do this pretty frequently. And so I use it a lot. And it is one of those things that really, really is helpful. And we'll teach you how to use that in the workshop as well.

45:27Now, one big question people get is, you know, what happens if I start to fail? What if my goals start to fall behind? Or what if they, you know, lag behind? And what I want you to understand is I don't want you to feel guilt about this. I don't want you to feel worried about this. Instead, what we need to do is just set some parameters in place. Number one is never miss twice. So if you want to work out three days a week and you miss a day, just make sure you don't miss the second day in that week. Or if you want to make sure that you're flossing every single day and you miss a day, just make sure you don't miss two days in a row.

45:56James Clear talks about this a lot in Atomic Habits where he basically says, don't break the chain. And if you do break the chain, just don't miss two days in a row. that is going to be the best overall golden rule when it comes to habits and making sure you stick to them. And then secondly, is I want you to think in a mindset of resetting, not restarting. Too many people just restart their life over and over and over again. For some of us, I think it gives us some dopamine because we're getting a fresh start over and over again. But instead, let's just make sure we hit the reset button and not the restart button because you're starting all over again on that specific goal.

46:28That means all the progress you made up to that specific point does not matter. Instead, we want to roll with the punches. We're never going to have a perfect goal. We're never going to have a perfect month, but instead we just need to roll with the punches and take them as they come. Adjust those goals every single week if you need to. That's why we have the scorecard because you can tweak and adjust your goal if you need to without having to make some drastic change when you get to the end of the quarter. This is something that helps a lot of people. Number two is when it comes to your financial goals, if you actually want to accomplish them, automation is the huge key.

46:57And we have episodes talking about automation, making sure you're automating your savings, your investments, your bills, and reducing that decision fatigue when it comes to finances. And so I highly encourage you to automate your finances if you have not already, because this is the thing that is going to help reduce some of that fatigue when it comes to making sure you hit those goals. And this ties into perfectly with consistency and weekly planning is just looking at those automations and making sure they're running smoothly. You want to spend less time on your money this year, that might be your goal, then automating your money is going to be really, really powerful.

47:29We also have a free automation checklist. If you want to check that out, we'll put it in the show notes down below that you can grab so you can learn how to automate your money step by step. So here's what I want you to do and what I want you to take away from this. Number one is I want you to reserve your spot in the Master Your Money Goals workshop. That's number one. Number two is I want you to schedule a time for a 30-minute clarity session where you're going to figure out what goals do I want to accomplish this year. A lot of things that I like to do is I like to take my wife out to lunch and we go and talk through our goals every year.

48:00Number three is write down one to three goals and set up these goals that you want to accomplish for the first quarter of this year. Four is I want you to set up one automation. Automate your finances in one specific way. And then five, plan the upcoming week. Those are the five action items that I want you to take to make sure that you're actually going to take steps towards accomplishing these goals. I am really, really excited for each and every single one of you for 2026. This is going to be your best year yet. And so we are going to show you exactly how to do this step by step. And so we've shown you exactly how to do this step by step in this podcast episode.

48:34And if you want to dive deeper, again, reserve your spot in the Master Your Money Goals webinar. Thank you guys so much for being here. I truly appreciate each and every single one of you. And we will see you on the next episode.