Financial bloggers, myself included, speak rather frequently about setting goals for your financial life. Goals are super important. If you don’t have a goal, you have no direction. Further, if you don’t have a goal, you have not intention for your money. You are intention-less.
What is your intention for your money? What purpose should your money serve?
A typical goal for money is to pay off this or that. To save for this date, or this item. But, deep down, there is an intention there. If your goal is to pay off a debt, the intention is for your money to make you debt free. If you’re saving up for something, the intention is to buy what you want without adding debt. If you’re saving up for a date, the intention is to reach that date with some amount of money to pay for things without adding debt, or having to live in a trailer.
Financial Intentionality, in my mind, is more important than financial goals. If the intention is all wrong, it just won’t help you out. I don’t think that it’s black and white. Call it karma, or morality, or whatever, but having a good intention will always get you farther than a bad one. Not only that, but I think that intentionally guiding your money is a better way.
My intention with my money is to facilitate a debt free lifestyle where I can enjoy what I do, and not have to worry about where the next payment is going to come from. There are sub-intentions. Or, rather, intentions that lead towards that grander intention. I intend to use my money to pay off my debt. I intend to use my money to provide for my family in a way that allows us our necessities and a few luxuries without causing us to go further into debt or life extravagantly.
What are your intentions with your money? Are the goals that you’ve set in line with those intentions?
Study what you do with your money. Are your spending habits in line with your intentions? How about your goals? Perhaps your intention is to become debt free, but, one of your short-term goals is to save up for a new HDTV. If you don’t really need that TV, your goal is way out of line with your intention.
Spend your money with intention. Keep your intentions in mind as you set your goals and spend your money.
photo credit: Truthout.org
I started this blog to share what I know and what I was learning about personal finance. Along the way I’ve met and found many blogging friends. Please feel free to connect with me on the Beating Broke accounts: Twitter and Facebook.
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My intention for my money is to facilitate a lifestyle of freedom – where I have the freedom to work on the things that really matter to me – to have the freedom to travel to places to new about new cultures, etc. Great post!
And that is the essence of my post, Jacob. When we live with and spend our money with intention, and towards those intentions, we lead a better life as a result.
Well, I guess I have a few levels of intentionality: use money to pay off debt; accumulate enough to provide financial and mental security and… get freedom to do what I love. So far, I am still on level one. A long way to go… 🙂
For sure, Aloysa. I think that as we grow and as we reach certain goals, our intentions grow and change with us. It’s those final intentions that truly guide us though.