Dreams and Goals and Money: Are Yours United?

Chatting with my friend Flora on Twitter made me think of this today. (Shoutout to her site Casual Money Talk!) She had asked about what’s on everyone’s bucket list and I mentioned my biggest life goals: world travel, my dream home, and improving the education system to actually help the majority succeed.

As we got on a tangent on dream homes (and comparing our modern mansion versus medieval castles) Rox at On Plan Rox casually dropped a huge nugget of wisdom:

Dreaming is good for the soul.

I couldn’t agree more, as dreaming is also good for your finances. Actually, that’s way understating it. It’s needed for your finances. It is unquestionably crucial for your financial well-being and future wealth. I cannot emphasize the “needed” enough, because you absolutely cannot get your finances to serve you well without having goals and dreams as your main motivation.

To clarify on this dreams bit: we’re not talking about the REM hallucinations you have in your sleep. We’re talking about what you envision your ideal life to include. Goals are the measurements you set to further reach those dreams. If you have never put time and thought into what your dreams and goals really are, close out of my site right now because nothing I say on finance will help you.

For the Rest: Your Money and Dreams Have a Mutual Relationship

Your money and your dreams are irrevocably linked. You cannot get one to grow without the other.

My six-figure wealth is inherently tied to achieving my dreams, as I have never dreamt of working as a marketer for the rest of my days. There’s more exciting things I plan to do in my future of telling stories and helping humanity. And because of my financial control, I actually can reach them. There’s roughly three very important reasons for this:

1. Your Dreams Force You to Prioritize

Paula Pant (aka the reigning queen of finance) nails this on the head with her famous tagline: “You can afford anything, just not everything”. Which is to say: no, you really cannot afford to buy an island, an airplane, AND the most popular whiskey distiller in the tri-state area. But, out of all of these, do you really want to buy any one of them? Is there anything else that takes first place in what you want to spend your money on?

In my eyes, buying all three of those things would be both awesome and a starter kit for founding an island nation dictatorship. But I know what my goals and dreams are, and none of those status symbols will satisfy me.

This line of thinking runs in the background during every purchase decision, both large and small. Would my dreams be any closer if, let’s say, I dropped a ton of money on food or bar-hopping? I didn’t have to think that much to know that no, doing so would actually push them farther from my reach. So instead I treat the money I do spend at restaurants or bars as an investment into my friendships, and do not buy or consume any more than a small dish or drink. My money has a bigger purpose than getting me buzzed or stuffed.

2. Your Dreams Keep Your Values Aligned

This commitment to my dreams also means commitment to my values; nobody’s dreaming about a future where their ethics are thrown out the window. Everything that I accomplish in life must be done in alignment with my values: without lying, cheating, hurting my friends, or hurting the environment. I love nature and honesty and my friends too much to go down that road. And what’s the point of achieving those goals and dreams if I can’t face myself in the mirror?

Same thing goes for you. Whatever your values are must be aligned with your dreams and, therefore, money. That’s how you not only know what to spend your money on but how you stay satisfied with that spend.

That’s why I’m satisfied with buying my wardrobe from the thrift shop instead of the mall. Doing so is the perfect storm of aligning my values with making great money moves AND advancing my dreams. Same thing applies for my spending less than $100 to furnish my home. Dropping a ton of money on all-new furniture would have actually set me back from my goals and dreams, aka my wealth. I can’t afford the guac when I’m paying off furniture loans, y’all.

3. Your Dreams Bump Your Income Higher

This is the most tangible result from reconciling your dreams with your money. Once you know the direction you want to steer your life towards, you can plan for the steps you need to take to reach it. If you’re planning a trip around the world like Phileas Fogg, you’ll plan (as he did) how you’ll actually do it. Taking control, and seeing results, is empowering like nothing else. I can look back at what I’ve already accomplished and think: if I can do THAT, what else is within my reach?

When it comes to that beast known as American work culture, this empowerment is exactly what’s needed to bump up your salary. It’s how I could reach a $90,000 salary at 25 years old, placing me firmly in the top five percent of earners in my age group. I could have never made the leap if it wasn’t for my dreams egging me on. Without my dreams telling me “maybe,” and “at least try!” I wouldn’t have had an answer to “should I really try and get a higher-paying job?” Let your dreams become your hype men and the money quickly follows.

How to Align Your Dreams with Your Money

To do all of this, you actually need to know what your dreams are. So take out time – and energy – to consider what you want out of life.

Put those dreams into words; identify what they are beyond the feelings they give you. The most aimed-for dreams I see regularly include homeownership, vacations with loved ones, and starting a family. If your dreams have anything in common, you can now make that your goal.

Yep. Just like that. The dreams are now goals to achieve in your lifetime, which is more in your grasp than you might think. Bring them out from your gossamer fantasies and into reality!

What’s nice is that there’s no upper limit to how many dreams you can have. It’s certainly easier to reach your goals if you have one (or at least less than five) but this is one of the only places where there’s zero constraint. You don’t even have to limit yourself to these dreams and goals in the future, if you realize there’s more you want to add. Add it! Flourish! Get inspired! The only thing that can limit you is how far your imagination can extend.

Have those goals? Can you articulate them? Good. I’d now split those goals into four categories: short-term, medium-term, long-term, and outrageous.

The short-term

These are things you can achieve in the next 2-5 years. I’d put things like “get to a healthy weight” or “get a high-paying job” into this category. We’re not looking at how easy or hard a goal will be, just how much time you think it’ll take. These are also the goals that you also don’t need a bunch of other people to accomplish, just your own effort.

Here are my short-term goals: rewrite the draft of my book to be publish-worthy, continue blogging, max my 401k and Roth IRA, and get my brother into the best life position we possibly can.

The medium-term

The medium-term goals are those that won’t take a lifetime but are still farther away than 2025. Mine include:

• Building my custom dream home in the NH mountains
• Ensuring my brother graduates college debt-free
• Fostering tweens and/or teenagers in a loving and supportive environment, and
• Becoming financially independent with $1.5 million dollars in index fund investments

The above goals are ones that are within my purview, ones that (thanks to a myriad of privileges and opportunities) I will achieve by staying the course. Below are the ones that require much more effort than one man can muster, as they affect more than one man.

The long-term and outrageous

I’ve got three long-term, pie-in-the-sky goals : create and maintain improved education in America, build alternative housing to relieve at least some of the affordable housing shortage, see a large increase in financial literacy. These will obviously require more people working on it than just me, and collectively more time than I have in this lifetime. But challenges are for other people to be defeated by, not me or you.

Which brings us to the outrageous goals, or those dreams that are so extreme that they’re the hardest of all to conquer: become an ambassador, create and maintain a safe home for big refugee populations, and fund scifi-levels of technological innovation for the teeming masses

I almost put my dream home goal into the “outrageous” section, because anyone who sees my house after it’s built will definitely say “that’s outrageous”. Cover image is more in line with what I want my house to look like than your average suburb. But I’m not setting my goals for THEIR yardsticks, I’m setting my goals for MY yardstick! And the only yardstick you should use for YOUR dreams is YOURS!

And Then We Turn to the Money

“But Darcy, where do you actually talk about MY FINANCES here??? Y’know, since you’re a FINANCE BLOG????”

As I said before, money won’t mean jack shit without dreams to back it up. Like anything big, going after riches requires a leap of faith. There are lots of folks happy to make that leap for marriage, or family, or health, but hate the thought of doing it for wealth.

Yet, looking over my list of goals and dreams, it’s money that will directly make most of them happen. Sure, this doesn’t include all of them. I can definitely do things like write, foster older kids, and support my brother without having growing investments. Several folks do all of that already with nothing to their names. Hell, I could even get more construction experience under my belt and build my own home brick by brick. Or just becoming a lumberjack and building it like this dude. Hey, we’ve got options.

But doing so wouldn’t align with the inherent components of my dreams and goals: specifically, achieving them while maintaining my standard of living. I like being stress-free with my finances, and I like not worrying over how I’ll afford it. These deep values of security stem from my not having a family safety net, so I’m on my own no matter what happens to me. Money, being the most important tool in America, is how anyone here can assure their own well-being. It’s this fact that made me start this blog up in the first place, so more folks can reach their goals and dreams thanks to wealth.

So see what you need to do or get to help you reach your outlined goals.

If you want to afford to stay home with your kids, figure out how much money you need to save up to do so. Same thing goes for buying your dream home, or funding your dream vacation. Or anything on your list of dreams, at the end of the day. Because achieving your dreams is how your money will best serve you. It’s not furthering your life goals or dreams if you pay no attention to what you’re spending it on. That money can definitely go towards boosting you up another step up the mountain. The further you climb, the more you’ll leave the shade behind and enjoy the warmth of the sun. But you can’t get up into that sunlight if you don’t dream of making it up that high.

So keep climbing, and keep dreaming. It’s an unavoidable requisite to your ideal financial life.

Do your dreams have any overlap with mine? There’s nothing I love more than to hear about other people’s goals and dreams. What do yours look like?