Financial Health

What is a "financial goal"?

I believe individuals should have short term, intermediate term, and long term financial goals. Some examples of these goals might be the following. A short term goal may be "I want to buy an iPod and I don't want to put it on credit, so I have to save a certain amount of money to do it, and once I have that amount of money I'm going to be able to buy it"; that would be a short term financial goal. An intermediate term financial goal might be that in one, two, three, or four years you might want to buy a new car or buy a condominium and you need a certain amount of money as a down payment to do it, so you establish this financial goal of putting a certain amount of money away each pay period so that at the end of the predetermined period of time you will have saved sufficiently to achieve the goal of having the down payment. Longer term financial goals, and probably the utmost long term financial goal, would be saving for retirement, which so many people neglect to do.