The Goals

Ask a million people for investing advice and you’ll get a million different answers. Blue chip, tech stocks, natural resources, gold, houses – all are quite different ways to invest, and all have their merits and faults. Through all this advice, one piece will come up again and again – and it should really be the first bit you get, before you even start worrying about which route to take. Before you start, remove your emotions, and set an intellectual goal.

This part about removing your emotions is possibly the most important piece of advice anyone can give you. If you tie your emotions too closely to your investment, or financial plan, you’ll find yourself riding the hype train over everything else. Sit down when you’re not hungry, angry, sad, annoyed, or overly excited and ask yourself “if my circumstances don’t change in the next 10 years, where do I want to be?”

It’s important to include the part about nothing changing – if I don’t earn any more than what I am earning now, if all my expenses stay the same, if the next 3650 days are all the same as they have been. This allows you to set a very realistic and achievable goal, something that it important to making sure you actually work towards it. After all, how many of us have the goal or dream of winning the lotto and yet never take a ticket?

Set goals based on the here and now, and set them for 10 years to start with. This will help breakdown what needs to happen at the 5-year mark, at the 2-year mark, at the 1-year mark and even what little bit you need to do every day to get there. It’s easier to save a dollar a day to buy a $700 console in 2 years, than to come up with the $700 on the day pre-orders open. By reducing goals to daily habits, you’ll end up getting there – maybe even sooner than you imagined.

Compared to others, my 10-year financial goals are pretty simple. The podcasts I have found myself listening to all have these elaborate plans and side hustles. It has made mine seem rather pedestrian. But then I remember to remove my emotion from the comparisons, and consider the here and now.

So, what are these goals for the next 10 years and what am I doing to reach them? Let’s dive in.

At Least Two More Rentals

This year, we took advantage of the growing equity in our existing house – which has almost doubled in value in just four short years – and used that to get a second house. Should the New Zealand economy behave over the next 10 years, and the housing market continue like it has been, it’s no stretch of the imagination to realistically assume we can get another two. That works out to about one house every 4 years… Should things change, we could accelerate or decelerate this plan. With this step carrying the most risk, keeping it simple is paramount.

But isn’t property typically a solid investment? How then can be the riskiest?
I am glad you asked, even though you didn’t. It is the riskiest due to actually having the power to bankrupt us. If the housing market changes, if house values decrease, if we can’t find tenants, then the burden of a second mortgage could mean we don’t only lose our second house, but our own one too. Of course, a lot would have to change before we find ourselves in this predicament. But it could.

The beauty of this investment though, is that property is typically a solid and safe investment. People need houses, and there will always be renters. Adding another two will add to our overall net worth and add to the cashflow in the next 20 years.

$100,000 Invested

This is going to be the hardest one, and $100,000 is both small and large at the same time. Based on an average return of 4%, if you invest $100,000 into dividend paying stocks, you’ll end up with a $4,000 a year paycheck – minus the taxes of course. While it pays you, it also could increase in total value. Your $100,000 might turn into $120,000 in a year, or it might not…

This investment will mean we’ll have to invest $10,000 a year. That will have to come from somewhere, and it must withstand expected and unexpected expenses – such as kids, other houses, etc… This will be the hardest to do consistently. Realistically, it means every payday I’ll have to set aside $385 to get to this goal. Is it doable? Yes, with some work…

For me, it’s also a pretty negligible risk – the money there is not earmarked for a future expense, it’s not meant for something else in the next 6 months. It’s meant for stocks, and going into the stock market with a buy and hold mindset keeps it from being mentally spent. This also assumes I’ll pick good stocks at the end of the day…

A Successful Blog

This one will take a bit of work. I have monetized my blog currently, and Google now owes me $17 US! I want this blog (or maybe another one, who knows) to become more successful and start earning at least $100 a month. That $100 can then be added to the $385, and help accelerate the goal of $100k invested. It also means people will be reading what I write, and I think that is pretty cool.

Getting there will involve putting in a lot more work into said blog or website. At present, I have some time to make this happen. But what happens when life gets busy again? It needs to be something evergreen. And since I do like writing fiction, I think maybe I’ll focus more on doing that.

As you can tell, this particular goal I have not fleshed out as much. But it’s on my radar now, so the brain-gogs can begin turning. It will probably start with more frequent posts, so be sure to follow along.
Also, please whitelist my site 🙂

A Successful Podcast

Doing The Xboxcast has given me a love for media and creation I never thought I’d have. Suddenly the idea of starting a YouTube channel, or doing a solo podcast is realistic. Of course, I’d like it if The Xboxcast podcast could become a full-time job for me and my friends, but I am fully aware of how unprofessional we are. So, at the moment, it is just fun and games. And probably a lot of practice.

In 10 years, I’d like to have a podcast that is bringing in some money, just to add to the revenue stream and to allow me to do something more creative on a day to day basis. At this stage, I am thinking of doing something around tech, even though it’s a saturated market. Currently, the hardest part is coming up with a clever pun to use as the name. That’s why I have not started this yet.

End Game

These are not all the goals, hopes and dreams I have, just the ones relating to my finances. Together, they represent a solid foundation for the next 10 years, with the endgame being to have at minimum $2 million in stocks and $2 million in assets. For the maximum, retire-right-now-to-do-what-the-hell-I-want, I’d need $4 million in stocks and $6 million in assets. How will I get there? That’s where goal setting, emotionless planning and daily habits come in.

Of course, life can and does change. After all the saying is “Life Happens”. But that’s not an excuse to at least prepare for it.

In the next post we’ll actually get into the numbers! Finally, something real! From where I currently am, to where I want to go. The road only appears long when you take the first steps, but after a while when you look back, you’ll realize you can’t even see where you began.

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And now I must put this in for the legal reasons…
I am not a financial advisor. All advice is taken with this in mind. I do not benefit from you using the same platform I do, or by using a different one. I do not have any insider knowledge of any company listed. Everything I will talk about – from the tools to the news – will be as available to me as it is to you. Again: I am not a financial advisor and never will be.