Today’s Daily Prompt is interesting: do you set personal goals for yourself? It could be goals in many different aspects of life, such as career, personal development, health and even hobbies. I believe that setting goals help us improve ourselves in whatever we want to be better at.
But should you set personal goals if you share finances? When you combine finances with your spouse, it means not only that bills are shared (and most likely paid from a joint account) – also financial goals are shared. If goals are “ours”, is there a place for “my goals”?
Absolutely!
I’m writing this post on a day when I get my weekly pay. It literally just hit my account as I was typing first paragraph of this post. When I’m done with writing, I will transfer my share of our expenses and savings to a joint account I have with my husband. I do it every week, as soon as I see bank app notification that I got paid.
But I also have personal goals when it comes to savings – I talked about them in a post where I shared how I manage my weekly pay and savings. I put money aside for my personal car maintenance, so I don’t have to pull from our shared savings. I save to cover my health insurance deductible, so I don’t have to take money away from savings I stash away for our shared goals and whenever I have money leftover at the end of the month, I put it in my personal emergency fund.
The thing is, the money sitting in my account is my money but it’s also not – if we needed to cover a bug expense and I had to use it for a common goal, it’s not a problem. If my husband needed to pay for something and was short – I’m going to use “my” savings. That’s how partnership works in my mind.
I transfer a certain amount we agreed on but what I do with the rest is up to me – I pay my personal bills out of the money I leave in my account. Anything I save, I save so I don’t have to burden my spouse with eventual problems and unexpected bills, and maybe be able to help him (us) out in the future.
There’s a place for personal goals in shared finances. For shared goals to work out, each person has to do their part. And by saving whatever I can, I do mine. I also think that everyone has something in their mind that they want to achieve in their life, even if they don’t have a clear plan how to do it. Setting a goal and breaking it down into smaller steps helps a lot.
And yes, sometimes we need to take a step or two back, because life happens. But if we reset and keep going, there’s a huge chance that in the end we will achieve what we wanted.
Do you set personal goals? What are they? I’m curious!
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