4 Simple Actions You Can Make To Crush Your 2025 Financial Goals
Practical tips based on research
For my first long-form post of 2025, I thought it would be a good idea to return to basics.
I recently read a paper titled The Study of the Impact of Financial Goal Setting on Personal Investment Performance, where the authors did a deep dive into the existing research on how to set and reach financial goals effectively.
After reading the paper, here are four actions—backed by research—that we can all apply to our own financial goals:
Real commitment to your financial goals.
Cultivating financial resilience
Developing internal financial controls
Upping your financial literacy
Let’s get into more detail about what the research has to say and how you can apply each action in 2025.
#1— Commitment to Financial Goals
The purpose of a financial goal is to clarify where you’d like to be financially in the future.
The tacky way to say it would be that it’s like having a roadmap for your financial journey.
But, a roadmap involves exact steps (that part comes later). A financial goal just means knowing your destination. A goal doesn’t fill in the most efficient steps of how to get there, but simply knowing where you want to end up is the first step to financial success—and honestly, puts you ahead of most people.
Whatever your goal—whether it’s buying a house, saving for your kids’ education, or building a retirement fund—having specific goals is the first place to start.
Here are a few steps on how to apply this:
Define Your Goals: Clearly define what you want to achieve and when. For example, "I want to save $50,000 for a home down payment in five years."
Break Down the Steps: Determine how much you need to save monthly or annually to reach your goal. This makes the process manageable and provides a clear savings target. If your goal is to save $50,000 a year, you’ll need to save $833 per month.
Stay Committed: This can be as simple as checking back in on your progress every three months. Have you been saving your $833 each month? Recommitting to your goals can help you stay on track.
#2—Resilience to what life throws at you
The longer-term your goals are, the more likely you are to have to deal with the crap life throws at you.
On paper, goals are simple. Saving $833 per month for a down payment is very simple. The hard part comes when you lose your job, get divorced, or experience something terrible in your life.
The longer term your goal is, the more certain you can be that terrible things are going to happen to you along the way.
Financial resiliency is staying the course of your financial goals even when bad things happen.
How do you build financial resilience?
I’ve summarized some of the research on financial resilience into actionable steps in this article:
#3—Develop Internal Financial Controls
Treat your money like a corporation.
Just as businesses implement internal controls to safeguard assets and ensure business plans are carried out, you can do the same with your finances.
Think of it as having policies for how you will manage your financial goals.
Here are a few examples:
Budgeting: Create a detailed budget to monitor income and expenses. This helps identify available cash for your goals. Returning to the house-saving goal, budgeting can help determine if saving $833 per month is even possible for you right now.
Now, I know most of you hate budgeting, and I have been critical of generic budget templates, but I have written in more detail on how to modify budget templates to be more realistic here:
Automate your Savings: If your budget determines that you have $833 available to save each month, what is the easiest way to ensure you follow through on that every single month for the next 60 months? Set up an automatic transaction that moves $833 per month from your checking to a savings account each month.
Monitor Progress: We already discussed this, but checking in on your progress on a pre-determined schedule—for example, once a quarter or even once a year—goes a long way toward staying on track.
#4— Up your financial literacy
Financial literacy empowers you to make informed decisions about your money.
Educating yourself on basic financial topics like how to invest or how mortgages work is critical for helping you achieve your financial goals and setting the right financial goals.
Without financial literacy, it’s hard to know for certain if homeownership is even the right goal for you to pursue right now.
That being said, As I have written in the past, financial literacy is not a cure-all:
An issue I have covered in depth in the past is that when it comes to getting better at making financial decisions, financial numeracy—knowing how the basic math behind personal finance works—is even more powerful than financial literacy:
Stay tuned. I’ll be back next Monday with another summary of research that will help you improve your financial decisions.
If you a new reader or just want a refresher on some of the research we’ve covered in the past, check out my archives of most-read articles here.
This article is for informational purposes only. It should not be considered Financial or Legal Advice. Not all information will be accurate. Consult a financial professional before making any significant financial decisions.