Your Money_ The Missing Manual - J. D. Roth [16]
43 Things (www.43things.com) is ideal for tracking long-term goals. It lets you list your goals and keep a journal of your progress. You can also cheer on other people as they pursue their goals. Cost: free.
StickK (www.stickk.com) takes a unique approach: You set goals, and then commit to a consequence if you don't meet them. For example, you might decide to pay off your credit cards by the end of next year—and if you don't, you'll mow your best friend's lawn for a whole summer. StickK tracks these commitments and consequences, and lets others view your progress. Cost: free.
The Prioritizer (http://tinyurl.com/prioritizer) is a simple tool from CNN Money: You create a list of up to 15 goals, and the site then asks you to choose between each possible pair of goals. When you're finished, you have a prioritized list of objectives. Cost: free.
Lifetick (www.lifetick.com) may be the most comprehensive goal-tracking site on the Internet. It lets you enter your core values, and then encourages you to set SMART goals (Setting SMART Goals). Each goal is broken into sub-tasks that are easy to track. There's also a Lifetick iPhone app. Cost: A free account lets you track four goals. For $20 per year, you can track unlimited goals and use advanced tracking features.
There are other options, of course. If you're a do-it-yourself type, you may find that Google Docs (http://docs.google.com), which is free, provides all the goal-tracking power you need. You could keep a word-processing document of your big goals, and track your daily goals in a spreadsheet, say. Some people use Wordpress blogs (http://wordpress.org) to record their progress. Experiment to find which method works best for you.
Old-School Tools
Not everyone is comfortable with web-based tools, especially when it comes to tracking their financial lives. If you're one of these people, there are plenty of other ways to stay focused.
For example, I, your humble author, use a spiral notebook. Every day, I make a list of my short- and long-term goals; paying the bills and paying off the mortgage both go on the list. As I accomplish a goal, I cross it off the list. At the end of the day, I copy all of my unfinished goals to a new page. In this way, the stuff I haven't finished floats to the top of the list and I add new goals at the bottom. You can use this same technique to track goals in your favorite text editor or spreadsheet program (including Google Docs; see the previous section).
Other people like visual reminders of their progress. You can draw a debt thermometer and stick it to the fridge, or write your annual savings goal on an index card and tape it to the bathroom mirror. Or create a chart with 360 checkboxes—one for every mortgage payment—and check off the boxes one by one as you make payments.
There are many ways to track the progress toward your financial goals, and no one method is right for everyone. Go with whatever works for you.
Your Money And Your Life: Advertising to Yourself
There's no shortage of TV and magazine ads telling you how and why to spend your money. But you don't see ads about why you should save; nobody's there telling you about the joys of Roth IRAs (see Learning to Love Roth IRAs).
Lynn Brem writes Take Back Your Brain (www.takebackyourbrain.com), a blog that aims to teach you how to fight the influence of commercial marketing and use professional advertising techniques to help you pursue your goals.
"Advertisers have spent billions of dollars developing and testing ways to influence us," Brem writes. "We cannot stop the torrent of advertising streaming toward us every day. What we can do is make sure at least some of it is advocating for objectives we have chosen for ourselves." Take Back Your Brain is filled with tips and techniques to help you use personal marketing—advertising to yourself—to stay focused on your goals.
Brem says that repeated exposure to images is a great way to