Goal setting is one of the most powerful tools I’ve found for achieving results in almost every aspect of life. Having a specific objective is helpful when making decisions and tracking progress towards whatever it is you want to achieve in life.
Unfortunately, I’ve found many people in the FI community with goals based around a number they have little control over: Net Worth. The same thing goes for any goals based around Retirement Savings, which may exclude net worth items such as a primary residence.
It certainly seems reasonable to set goals based on these numbers, especially because the most common path to FI involves reaching a specific amount of Retirement Savings before living off a small percentage of them annually (such as 4%). The problem appears when combining a long term goal like saving 25 times your annual expenses, a volatile asset like the stock market as the primary force to grow those savings, and a goal based on a short time frame such as one year.
All of these factors combined set these particular goal setters up for some serious disappointment down the road.
Let’s dive into a little more detail on why Net Worth goals are dangerous and look at a better goal to set for yourself for the coming year.
Don’t Mix Long Term Growth and Short Term Performance
One of the key tenants of the index fund approach to financial independence is to invest money consistently and ignore it for 15+ years. The ignoring part is vital because a common failure of the average investor is pulling money out of the market when it’s heading down.
The stock market is volatile and we expect there to be stretches of downturns over time, but the long term trend is up. Even the worst market timer in the world can do extremely well over time if they simply leave the money alone after it’s invested!
If you accept that you can’t predict the future of the market at any given time, particularly over a short time frame like one year, then it’s best to avoid setting goals that are largely tied to market performance.
Influence on Net Worth Diminishes Over Time
For someone just starting out on their financial journey, the market will have very little impact on the ability to grow their investments. This growth will be almost entirely tied to their savings rate and how much they are able to add to their portfolio via new contributions.
Over several years, these new contributions will become a smaller and smaller part of the overall investments and market performance will start to have a greater impact. This is fantastic over long periods because the compounding returns start to take over and eventually allow for an early retirement (if desired), but it also sets up a dangerous trap for someone who is trying to measure their success in the short term.
Goals Have Two Possible Outcomes
Achieving a goal (such as reaching a certain Net Worth by the end of the year) feels great! The downside is that for every ounce of happiness achieving that goal brought you, there may be an equal amount of disappointment waiting if you happen to fail.
If you have been setting Net Worth targets for the past 5+ years and hitting them every time, you might be in for a big shock when a bad year causes you to miss that same goal. It might even make you start to question whether or not you are still on track long term and whether or not you need to make any immediate changes to compensate.
These are not the thoughts you want swirling around your head as the stock market crashes around you! These are the types of thoughts that make people pull money out of the market in an attempt to “cut their losses” or “salvage what they still have left”.
I imagine emotions will be running hot when the next bear market rears its ugly head, especially for the large number of people that have never held investments during a downturn before. The last thing you want is to start missing your goals for that year, especially if your spending and savings habits are as good as they have ever been!
Luckily we can mitigate some of these problems ahead of time by setting better goals to begin with.
Set Annual Savings Goals Instead
Unlike the performance of the market, one factor you have much more control over in the short term is your savings rate. Specifically, how much you plan to add to your investment portfolio over the course of the year. I prefer to use a fixed dollar amount goal such as “We will buy at least $25,000 in new investments this year”, but something percentage based such as “We will invest at least 50% of our take home pay this year” may work better for your own situation.
Either way, these return the primary influence on whether or not your goals are achieved back to something you can actually control (spending and saving habits) instead of something that is completely out of your hands (market performance).
In fact, this type of goal should have the opposite effect of the bull market problems of a Net Worth goal I mentioned above! Adding more money to an index fund that is losing percentage points on a daily basis can be physiologically challenging, but it also happens to be the only way you can reach your goals for the year.
Setting a goal based on an action that you control (investing new money in the market) can be powerful in helping positively reinforce those actions in the future, even if that very same action may seem foolish in the moment (if the market has a recent downward trend).
Start Now!
As I write this, we are amidst a raging bull market that is up over 18% for the year, so I have no doubt those with Net Worth and Retirement Savings goals are feeling rather pleased with themselves. Especially some of the people I saw who reached their goal back in the summer thanks almost entirely to solid market growth!
Bull markets have the ability to disguise how poor Net Worth can be as a goal metric. For example, if you already met your primary goal for the year, you may lose that extra mental incentive to maintain strong spending habits through the final months of the year. This kind of slip up may not appear to have a large effect on your long term retirement goals, but it could make a significant difference. In the future, there may be no amount of cutting expenses that can make up the net worth loss of a down year, especially if you are in the second half of saving towards FI.
If you currently set annual financial goals based on Net Worth and/or Retirement Savings, feel lucky you haven’t been burned recently, but it’s probably best to switch that goal over to be Savings based in the coming year. You just might thank yourself when the market eventually turns for the worse!
Well said. Hope the Gap Year planning is going well!
Thanks Justin, planning is going well. Only a month and a half to go!
Yes, setting goals over things you can’t control is pretty dumb.
I’m glad we agree 🙂
Exactly – even if you “make” those goals, you didn’t necessarily do much to get there. If you’d invested all your net worth in bitcoin right now, you’d have doubled your money in the past month. But I wouldn’t recommend that 😉
Our goal for next year is to hit a 50% savings rate. Simple to set, hard to achieve, but almost 100% within our control, barring some crazy unexpected expenses.
50% is awesome Angela, hopefully you guys can pull it off!
Very good point here. While we have not set annual Net Worth goals in the past, we do track monthly and I was just thinking about how many aspects of the Net Worth (especially as someone heavily invested in index funds!) is out of our hands. We could have a $10K gain one month and find ourselves with a $20K loss the next due to Market flux, regardless of how much we are saving and investing. With the hot market right now, this is particularily top of mind. I like the switch to focusing on savings 🙂
Have a great Christmas/Holiday season and Happy New Year!
Thanks Mrs. Adventure Rich,
I also track our Net Worth among other things each month and it’s crazy to watch it fluctuate with the market. Luckily, I’ve become fairly numb to the volatility and just make sure we’re hitting our spending and savings goals. The net worth will work itself out in the long run.
Happy holidays to you as well 🙂
Agreed. If you simply pay yourself first, ideally maxing out 401k & Roth IRA, etc., the rest will take care of itself. Mrs. WW and I track expenses, not for the purposes of restricting ourselves, but to ensure our spending is congruent with our values. Just last night we were talking about how we just hit ~25x our expenses and how long it would take to reach 33x expenses. While that was a fun exercise (only 2.5 years assuming a small market return), forecasting market returns is a fruitless exercise to your point. Manage what it’s in your power and ignore everything else!
Sounds like we look at our spending in a similar matter Jason. We also don’t budget specific amounts, but track everything and review once a month to make sure our spending matches our values as well.
25x expenses is an amazing milestone, congratulations!
Great advice! I must admit I have been one of those people that set net worth goals. After reading this I will now set ether a fixed dollar amount or I might do it by percentage. Because like you said depending on the market the net worth is not in my control.
I will be setting a goal of saving $25K in 2018 which is about 50% of my income.
Thanks! You certainly weren’t alone, the many posts/comments I’ve seen on net worth goals inspired this post to begin with. Luckily it’s never to late to adjust.
Best of luck towards your 2018 savings goals!
This is the first year I’ve even considered setting a NW goal and that was only because I got bored after squeezing all the juice out of our budget to set up our automated investing and saving goals. It seemed silly to set a NW goal when it’s basically out of my hands once the savings are committed and the raging bull is going to take a turn at SOME point. I suspect I’ll mentally earmark a very high NW goal I’d like to see but it certainly wouldn’t rise to the level of being an actual goal. My real focus will be on increasing income and savings.
Thanks for reading Revanche!
A net worth goal you don’t put very much weight on isn’t very dangerous, but I tend to just call those optimistic projections instead of goals. Whatever works best for you 🙂
Very good points. I like the Scott Adams method — having a system rather than a goal. I think that is the essence of long term investing. A lot of younger people have not yet experienced major market declines. Your article will be even more valuable looking back, once one does occur.
Thanks Susan, I agree that a significant market decline will make people rethink their goals.
I agree with your point that setting a savings goal is probably better since you have more control, but I don’t think you should completely give up on net worth. While some portions of your net worth may be out of your hands (investment returns) there are other factors that you can control. Each year as you get more equity in your home you increase your net worth. So while your mortgage payments reduce your savings, a portion of those payments increases your net worth. Someone with rental properties would be in the same position. I also like the idea of tracking net worth because it gets you in the mindset of thinking about your cash as an asset. Saving more is great but if you don’t think of it as a way to earn more money it will be challenging to become financially independent.
Hey Joe, I’m definitely not opposed to tracking net worth or even setting goals around it! Hopefully the article didn’t come off that way, but I tried to specifically focus on the timeline because that’s the most important part.
In the time frame of a year, you have less and less control over your net worth movement as you accumulate more and more assets. Investment value and property value are two big components that fluctuate in value over short term periods.
Net worth over 5+ years and even decades starts to smooth out the volatility and becomes almost entirely within your control, so I agree it’s an important number to track. Just don’t base your success in a random 365 day period entirely on how your net worth moved.
Agreed. You really need to focus on the long term and kind of ignore the short term fluctuations. The rest market sell off really adds a lot of support to your argument. If you focused just on net worth you would be feeling pretty terrible after this week!