When you have more than one goal, think about how important each one is, how long it will take, and how much you need.

You don’t have to give up on your other goals in order to save for big financial goals like retirement. But it’s hard to decide what comes first. How are you supposed to decide between a long-term goal like retirement and a shorter-term goal like a honeymoon? Or to put down on a house?

Start by making a list of everything you want to do. They could be expensive things you want to buy, fun things you want to do, or costs you want to be ready for. Once you’ve named them, figure out how much you’d need to reach each one and how soon you’d like to get there.

Once you’ve made a list of all the things you could save for, it’s time to decide which ones are most important to you. You could rank each goal, or you could just pick your top five to ten. Then, based on your time frame, you can figure out how much you’d have to save each month to reach these goals.

Then, look at your budget. Figure out how much you can save each month and put it toward your most important goals first. We strongly suggest that you set up automatic deposits so that you won’t be tempted to stop working toward your goals.

Your financial goals and your plan don’t have to be set in stone. Over time, you might find that you can save more or that you can’t save as much as you thought. Your goal might take more or less time to reach. Or your priorities could shift. It’s fine. Tenjin AI makes it easy to set goals, automate them, and change them.

In this manual, we’ll talk about:

– Setting your money goals

– Setting the order of your goals

– Choosing where to spend your money

– Making changes to goals as needed

Financial goals help you plan for things you’d like to do with your money but can’t do right now. Like retiring. Getting a home. Your kids are going to college. Getting the car of your dreams. Remodeling your kitchen.

When you know what you want to do, you can figure out how much you need and when you need it. When you know your goals, it’s also easier to choose the right financial accounts to help you reach them faster. But what if you have more than one financial goal? Now, it’s harder to figure out how much money to put toward each goal.

Even if you’re working toward one goal, you can still reach another. Here’s how to decide what your financial goals are and how to rank them.

Set out your money goals.

If you sit down and make a list of all the things you’d like to do with your money, it’s likely to be much longer than you think. Do it. It’s important to write down each goal, because you might forget something important if you don’t.

Some of your goals could be as simple as saving up for holiday gifts or as big as planning for retirement or long-term care. If you’re thinking about it, write it down.

Part of this process should be figuring out how much you need to save and when you want to reach each goal. Is it in a few months? Years? Decades? Will it cost a few hundred dollars or a million? There should be a date and amount for each goal.

Every time you set a goal on Tenjin AI, it’s easy to add this information. (And you can always change it.)

Focus on what’s important to you.

Your goals for your money are yours. It doesn’t matter what your parents want or what your friends think you should do. Make a list of your goals in order of how important they are to you.

Remember that putting your goals in order doesn’t mean that the ones at the bottom won’t get done. For example, you shouldn’t be afraid to pay off debt and invest at the same time. This is just to help you decide which goals are most important to you.

After you’ve ranked your goals, your list might look like this:

1. Pay off your medical bills.
2. Make a fund for emergencies
3. Save for retirement
4. Put money down on a house.
5. Fix up the bathroom.

You can list as many goals as you want. And in Tenjin AI, you can add each goal to your account, whether you’ve put anything toward it or not.

Put your list and budget together.

Now that you know how much you need to save, when you need to save it by, and which goals are most important to you, it’s time to see what you can actually do.

Using your estimated amount and your timeline (in investing, this is called your “time horizon”), figure out how much you need to save each month to reach each goal. It’s fine if you can’t save this much money right now. You can ask questions like, “Can I reach all of these goals by these dates?” if you have the numbers in front of you in an ordered list. “Which goal(s) am I willing to put off so I can move forward with the others?”

If you plan to invest to reach your goal, you should also think about how much you can earn with an investment account to help you reach your goal. When you set a goal in Tenjin AI, we’ll take care of this part. You can tell how realistic your goal is by how much work you put into it.

Automate your financial goals

How can you be sure you’ll reach your goals? Program them. Don’t let yourself stop working toward your goals. Set up recurring investments for each goal with the amount you’ve set aside for it, and the right amount will go to the right goal automatically. This makes it easy to make a budget based on your goals, and you won’t miss a month by accident. People often call this strategy “paying yourself first” because you put money toward your most important goals before you spend it on anything else.

Want to start putting money toward your goals? Set a goal in Tenjin AI and see how far you can get.