When initially jumping on the path to financial independence, it was exciting because there were a lot of things I needed to do and short-term goals to accomplish. While the notion of get rich quick is not in my vocabulary anymore, quick wins are still a thrill. Getting through creating budgets, finding areas to save money by getting rid of old subscriptions and things that I didn’t value all gave the rush of quick wins. Recently I hit my final short-term milestone of paying off smaller debt. Now that the quick win dust is settling, the semi long road ahead is showing up and it sometimes feels daunting. At my current pace, my next debt will not be paid off for another 4 years. Immediately after the last set was paid off, there was a mini sense of celebration, followed by some lifestyle creep. Once that got out of my system and I was back on the path, I then began to feel the pressure to try and make more money, not because I wasn’t fine with the path I was on, but because I don’t think I could sustain waiting 4 years for the next quick win.
While it is not bad to try and find ways to make more money, the reasoning and pressure that I was starting to put on myself was making the likelihood of me staying the course less and less. While I am still trying to find short term wins, here are somethings that I am doing to try and shift to the long game.
- Syphoning off the sense of urgency – There are some things that do warrant urgency in your day to day living but when it comes to the long-term planning, if there is something that you are not going to act on in the next six months, there is no need monitor it daily. I was tracking my net worth daily (multiple times a day), I started planning anticipated trips ahead for the rest of the year which is not bad. But then I started booking trips trying to get the optimal price far ahead and not getting the refundable options then getting stressed out when plans changed and that trip I booked 8 months in advance now needed to be changed. Even this blog, which is supposed to be a good outlet and lessons learned became more of a chore because I felt the need to speed up the process and focus on 4 years from now vs the here and now since there are no more quick wins to report on. This then rolled over into every bit of free time feeling the need to utilize every bit of it to catch up to the folks who have already made it. After taking inventory of all the “urgent tasks” I was doing and realizing I was not following my own advice, I decided to take a step back and start over from my why. If you just go through your list of urgencies and ask yourself “Will I still reach my goal if I don’t do this now?” If the answer is no, keep it on the list but if the answer is yes then ask yourself “Why are you trying to do it now vs later?” Taking a lot of those items off your list should hopefully help remove the unnecessary sense of emergency and help you protect yourself for burn out.
- Make fun interim goals that will help you stay on track – I won’t stop creating new goals when necessary but some of my financial goals I was focusing on are now transiting into some mini quality of life goals (that could be financially beneficial too). I have some quality goals like learning a new skill that can help me in my current job (and possibly a side hustle in the future). I also have some fun goals like tracking the trajectory of my mortgage vs my car mileage and predicting when they will intersect (and my car mileage is greater than my mortgage balance).
- Refocusing on the present – When focusing on the short-term goals, they are easy to focus on because they are close to the finish line. All your attention can be focused on it but when the goal is longer term and the finish line is far ahead of you, then you must take time to enjoy the scenery while you are on the path. One of the goals of getting to financial independence was to be able to spend more time with my family, especially my daughter. I found that there were times when I had an opportunity to spend time with her but decided to focus on accomplishing some far of goal in the future instead. When you are switching to the long game, it can’t be all or nothing. If I spent 100% of my time over the next 4-5 years on the finish line and none with my daughter then by the time I get to the goal, the people I am wanting to spend time with may not care to spend time with me because they would have gotten into the same habit or found something/someone else to spend that time with. Incorporating some routine time to do some of the things that you are hoping to do more of in the future will also make the time to get there go by quicker.
I know this transition is not always easy, if I ease up too much, I may risk losing the momentum and not finishing strong so it is going to be an ebb and flow and the monthly progress report will hopefully keep me from straying too far.