With Kroger Brand products from Ralphs, you can make all your favorite things this holiday season. Because Kroger Brand's proven quality products come at exceptionally low prices. And with a money-back quality guarantee, every dish is sure to be a favorite. ♪ These are a few of my favorite things ♪ Whether you shop delivery, pickup, or in-store, Kroger Brand has all your favorite things.

Ralphs. Fresh for everyone. ♪ ♪ Get in zone, AutoZone ♪ Welcome to AutoZone. What are you working on today? I think my battery's dead. With free battery testing and charging, we can help you get back on the road. ♪ Get in zone ♪ So, what if I need a new one?

No problem. We have the right battery for your car, starting at only $89.99. ♪ Get in zone, AutoZone ♪ And what about my old battery? We can recycle it right here at America's #1 battery destination. ♪ Get in zone, AutoZone ♪ Restrictions apply. Hey, Radicals, remember, less than five days remaining before a major price increase on my newest course, HackProof, how to beat fraudsters, prevent identity theft, and say goodbye to cybercrime.

Sign up today at HackProofCourse.com before the increase. HackProofCourse.com. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua Sheets.

I'm your host. Today, I want to share with you some good and useful and productive financial goals that you can establish for the new year. Now, clearly, recording and releasing this on Wednesday, January 25, 2023, I'm a little bit late. Thank you for your patience. My wife and I have been a little busy welcoming our fifth child to our household.

Thankfully, we want you to rejoice with us. Thankfully, very happy to report that childbirth went well. Mom and baby are doing well. Everyone's doing perfectly. And settling into our new, larger, expanded family, and everything is going swimmingly. So we're doing really well, but obviously, it's a very important time.

And so I've been off the microphone to be caring for my wife and our children, etc. And so forgive me for being just a little bit late. But in some ways, and by the way, I was often when we have a baby, I come back and I do a podcast about something related to childbirth.

And I actually spent the last hour sitting here working on one, but I couldn't, not childbirth, but having children, I couldn't get the tone right. So I'm canning that episode and doing this episode instead. Anyway, it could turn out to be a good thing that I'm creating this podcast about intelligent goals for the new year, because this is a good time to be thinking about it.

Yes, maybe it would have been better if it were before January 1. But here are some things that I want to give you these ideas, because these are intelligent goals to do anytime. And there's some things that now that we're well in the swing of the new year, the holiday season is behind us.

This is prime work time. Middle to end of January, February, March. This is just the best work time. There's no hassle. You're focused, you're motivated, you're clear on what you're doing, and this is a good time to work. So I want to give you some good and useful goals for you to consider.

Perspective goal number one, build an intelligent, workable, useful financial tracking system. Now, this one I wish I had gotten to you before, but again, it's fine. I'm glad to get it to you now. All of us need some kind of intelligent, workable financial tracking system. You need to know how much you're making, how much you're spending, and what you're spending it on.

The system that is right for you is going to be different than the system that is right for me. More importantly, the system that is right for you today is going to be different than the system that was right for you five or ten years ago. And the system that is right for you today is going to be different than the system that is right for you five or ten years from now.

I've recorded many podcasts about budgeting, budgeting systems, etc. This is an area in which I think people labor under the delusion that there is a right way to do it. They think, "I have to budget every cent of my money, every penny of my money. I need to know where every dollar goes." No, you don't.

But you must have some kind of intelligent system if you're going to win with money. That intelligent system will look different based upon the circumstances of your life, where you are financially, and what you're doing. If you're a hard-working single dad raising three children on $3,000 a month, you're going to need a budgeting system that accounts for every dollar.

If you're a hard-working man who is paying off his debt and has a goal of paying off $150,000 of student loan debt this year on your $200,000 income, you're going to need a hard-working budgeting system that accounts for most of your dollars. If you're a well-paid executive earning $350,000 a year, and you don't have any debt except your mortgage, everything is in good shape, etc., you don't need a budgeting system that's going to track every dollar.

But you do need to have a system that tells you where you are financially. Business owners and entrepreneurs go bust when they don't track their company's performance. Individuals go bust when they don't track the performance of their individual financial enterprise. And so you need to have a system that works for you.

So I want you to take a moment and ask yourself, "How well is my current system working for me?" Here are some ideas to help you judge it. Number one, if I'm talking to Joshua Sheets, my financial advisor, and Joshua Sheets asks me, "How much money do you spend?" Can I give him an answer?

Can I give him an answer very, very quickly? By the way, it's fine with me if you need to open an app or check a spreadsheet or check something, but you need to have some kind of answer. How much money do I spend? Well, I spend $10,000 a month.

I spend $18,000 a month, or I spend $150,000 a year. Whatever the number is, you need to have an answer. Here's about how much money I spend. That's a good thing to know. You also need to know how much money you make, etc. So you need to have some system that's going to tell you this data quickly and easily.

This is easy for employees, right? You know your top-line salary number. If you have an idea of what your bills are, etc., you can have the number, but you need a system that's going to tell you how much you spend. Here's another question to analyze your current tracking system.

Do I know if I'm on track to reach my goals? Is this system helping me to be on track to reach my goals? Am I confident that I'm on track to reach my goals? The reason we track money is so that we can know if we're on track, on course, towards our goals.

The reason people all of a sudden start budgeting when they want to get out of debt is so that they can get out of debt. They set a goal, and you need a new system to know whether you're going to achieve that goal. And so your financial tracking system should tell you whether you are on track to reach your goals.

Now, how you do this is up to you. There are many good apps that can help you. I'm not sure that you need a standalone app in many cases. First, let's talk about your income. If you are a wage earner, you probably have a fairly standard, consistent income. That's good enough.

If you can just put down your top line W-2 income, that tells you how much money you make, great. If you're a business owner, you should be able to get your income from your bookkeeping system. If you don't have a bookkeeping system that's effective, that's a good sign that you're not doing as well with your business and management as you should be.

If you're being coached as an entrepreneur, and your coach comes in and assesses your bookkeeping system and finds out that you don't have a dashboard of reports that's going to tell you on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly basis what your profit and loss is, how things are trending, etc., your coach is going to tell you to fix that.

So if you can't tell me how much money you're making, fix it. Find some kind of system that's going to work for you to fix it so you know how much money you're making. On expenses, a detailed spreadsheet of expenses can be helpful for some people, especially if you enjoy that.

But for many of us, it's not necessary. What you want to think about is a system that allows you to control your expenses adequately. So you've heard of pay yourself first. The reason pay yourself first is so powerful, is it allows you to spend freely knowing that you've saved and invested.

In a moment, I'll talk about setting a goal of maxing out your retirement accounts. It's a wonderful goal to set. It's a great goal to set. Here's what's especially great about it. If you earn wages and up front, you divert those wages into your retirement account, and if you're convinced that that's enough money for you, you don't need any more money for that, and all of the balance of your wages goes into your checking account, then you can just spend all the money that's in your checking account and you're in good shape.

If you just set it up so that all your bills are paid on the same day that your paycheck hits your checking account, and you want to know if you can afford to buy something, you just pull out your phone, see what the balance is in your checking account, and either swipe your debit card or not swipe your debit card.

That's a bulletproof system. It's a wonderful system. It's going to give you an appropriate dashboard as to whether or not you can afford to spend money. Notice in what I've described, you're not using credit cards, you're not going into debt, you're saving money first by simply putting it into your retirement account, and then you are just spending money that's in your checking account, and if the money's there, you can spend it.

If not, you can't. So that works really, really well. Now, the cool thing is most of our banks now can produce for you, just like our credit cards have been able to do for years, they can produce for you an end-of-year statement. Here at the end of January, with most of your major credit card issuers, you should be able to access your end-of-the-year spending breakdown.

And a great way to track your money is just to use this. If you have one card that you spend all your money on, one credit card, and you just always swipe that card at the end of the year, now you can pull open that summary and you can see it there.

Again, many banks will do this, many credit cards will do this, and you can get an idea of what you spend your money on. That works really, really well. And as long as there aren't many other systems that cause you problems, meaning as long as you're not spending on too many accounts, or as long as you don't have too many transactions that aren't recognized there, then I think this is a great system.

In conclusion, goal number one is simply assess, or establish, or restructure your financial tracking system so that you can have accurate information about your expenses over the next year. Even if you just create the system, having it there as a dashboard will automatically start to move you into a better territory with your money.

Pivot now to goal number two. What's goal number two? Well, goal number two is analyze your data and see if you are on track for your goals. Every person should sit down at least once a year and assess whether or not you are on track towards your financial goals.

Again, the way that you did this 10 years ago is different than how you should do it today and is different than how you will do it 10 years from now. 10 years ago, you may have been just getting started and you're sitting down and you're crunching every category.

Today, you may be much more comfortable and you just need to make a broad overview and make sure you're on track. 10 years from now, you may be mega wealthy and so your goal setting is going to be different, but you need to analyze how you're doing and whether or not you are on track.

Now, the best tool of analysis that I know of is what I created, the Radical Personal Finance Framework for Wealth. Number one is increase income. Two is decrease expenses. Three is invest wisely. Four is optimize lifestyle. Excuse me, four is avoid catastrophe and five is optimize lifestyle. Here are your five ideas.

And the way I do this and the way I encourage people to do this is to sit down and just ask yourself, "Where am I weakest right now? Is my income weak? Is my spending weak? Is my investing weak?" Et cetera. "Where am I weakest right now?" For most people, income is your biggest opportunity.

So spend some time analyzing how you can increase your income. Maybe that means you go through your company's compensation package and make sure you really, really understand it and ask yourself, "Are there any bonuses that I'm missing out on?" For example, "Can I increase my income if I get a master's degree?

Could I increase my income if I could lower the complaint reporting on our company's product or if I improve the efficiency by 5%? Could I earn a bonus? Or is there a career change I could start making a plan for?" Et cetera. Now, I've talked a lot about income.

So I'm going to skip quickly to now expenses. With expenses, one of the reasons you need a tracking system is so that you can look at your expense categories on a category basis. So what I encourage you to do is you take your tracking system, you export the categories and put them all on a sheet and you order them from biggest category to littlest category.

And then ask yourself, looking at each category, starting with the biggest number, "Is there a way I can reduce this?" My favorite question is this, "Can I cut this category by 50% and double my satisfaction with it?" So for most of us, the single biggest category is tax, income tax.

The biggest expense in our lives is income tax or employment tax. So ask yourself, "Is there a way I can reduce this expense by 50% and increase my satisfaction?" And this is where you get into tax planning. And so simple things like, "This is the year I'm going to set up an S corporation in order to reduce my self-employment tax." Or, "This is the year I'm going to move from one side of town, which is in the high-tax state, to the other side of town, that's in the low-tax state." Or, "This is the year I'm going to change and move to a tax haven." Or, "This is the year I'm going to start the side business and use the-- I'm going to convert my hobbies into a side business and use those side business expenses to offset the losses on my primary income." Or, "This is the year I'm going to start tracking my mileage more diligently or tracking my business meals more diligently." And you go through it, you know, all the stuff.

Taxes, unfortunately, generally involves a lot of little things that when added up can often be a good bit of savings. There's no one thing that you can generally apply except often moving. And most people aren't going to move and shouldn't move because tax planning should not be your primary lifestyle driving goal.

But you look at taxes. Then for many people, what next question is housing? "Well, am I happy with the money I'm spending on housing?" Et cetera. And go through each category and just ask yourself, "Am I satisfied with this or can I get more benefit from this category?" Not all categories should go down.

The goal is not to always live in a cheaper house. The goal is not to always live in a cheaper tax situation. The goal is to maximize each category and be really confident that you're doing what is right for you. Now, on the investment perspective, we do talk quite a lot here at Radical Personal Finance about investing.

And with investing, it's important that you recognize that your stages of life that you go through as an investor vary a lot. And there are different investments that are really, really smart at different times. So when you're very young, investing in education and credentialization is often your very best investment.

Sometimes as you start to get into the workforce, especially if you have some control over a business, investing in marketing is your best investment. Investing in growing your brand and growing your customer base is your best investment. As you start to acquire money and capital, now your best investment comes from optimizing your investment returns.

And if you got $1,000 in the bank and you can get a 20% rate of return on your money with some great investment, oh, big deal, you've made $200. On the other hand, if you got a million dollars in the bank, going from a 10% rate of return to a 20% rate of return would make a huge difference in your experience.

And so as you get older and your capital grows, now you need to give more and more time and more and more attention to investing. You can't do the same thing all throughout your life. When you're 25, ignore investing. Focus on earning and keeping expenses low. When you're 55, earning and low expenses are not nearly as important as the rate of return that you make on your capital.

Avoid catastrophe. Go through all the list of things that you can, the bad things that could happen to you. Review your coverages, right? Sit down with your property and casualty agent and make that your February goal. Let's review all my property and casualty coverages. In March, sit with your life insurance agent.

Let's review my life insurance coverages. Ah, sorry. This is the perfect spot for my ad. In February, we all know what you're going to be doing. You're going to be taking the course that we're doing called Hack Proof. So let me just take a moment and do my ad.

Gabriel Custodio and I have teamed up before for our Bitcoin course, which by the way, you can buy at bitcoinprivacycourse.com. But as we were talking about areas where we think there's a shortage of good information, where we can add good value, we decided to focus on this topic of Hack Proof, how to beat fraudsters, prevent identity theft, and say goodbye to cybercrime.

Because, and this fits perfectly here as I talk about avoiding catastrophe, because one of the best things you can do to avoid catastrophe is eliminate your identity theft risk. So make this your February project. You're going to take our course in February. It's going to be a two-part live class where we talk about all the things that you can do to basically button down your document and your financial situation so that you can prevent identity theft and become hack proof and eliminate the huge risk of cybercrime.

As we talked about in the standalone episode that we did with an ad for the show, it's a huge industry and it's a huge risk. And this is one of those things that a few simple things done in advance can protect you. So sign up today, go to hackproofcourse.com and sign up today, hackproofcourse.com.

Now after the course, then in April, sit with a bankruptcy attorney and do pre-bankruptcy planning as part of your asset protection planning. In May, talk to a marriage counselor and ask him how you can bulletproof your marriage so that you don't wind up in divorce course. In June, take a seminar on child raising and how to keep your kid off drugs.

In July, take July off and take your kids to the mountains. Just go through and ask yourself all the catastrophes that could happen, right? Maybe July, buy prepping items or something. Go through and think regularly, how can I avoid catastrophe? What are the hazards that could face me? And then optimize lifestyle, regularly getting in touch with your vision for the future, your plans and your dreams for your life one year from now, five years from now, ten years from now, and making sure that you're optimizing how you earn your income, how you spend your money, how you invest your money, etc., how you live your family life, etc., and thinking those things through.

So goal number two is just analyze your data, look at it. You often, one of the reasons I try to give so many ideas is just to inspire you to think creatively. At the end of the day, at some point, you got to pull out your own numbers, look at them and analyze them and find opportunities for improving.

And if you do that aggressively, you'll find that your life can change very, very quickly. Goal number three that I want you to consider making for this year is very simple. Pay off all non-mortgage debt. Pay off all non-mortgage debt. Some cases, some people want to consider paying off mortgages too, but at the very least, pay off all non-mortgage debt.

Why do I say this as a potential goal? It's quite simply this. In my years of financial planning, I have observed that persons who live their life free of debt are able to adapt and respond, react quickly and easily to the changing desires that they have. And they're not burdened by the commitments and mistakes of the past.

Folks who use debt never get to respond and pivot to how they want to live today because they're often beholden to the past. They're tied to their past decisions. So just simply getting free of all non-mortgage debt and making a goal to pay off all non-mortgage debt can be one of the most rewarding things that you can do.

And it's a wonderful financial goal for you to set. In most cases, you can accomplish this in less than a year. The reason I'm confident in that assertion is very simple. You're generally not going to be lent more money under the kind of American system of credit scores, etc., than what you could pay off in a year of focused effort.

Most people, you have to go through financial underwriting when you borrow money. And if you sit down and you decide, "I'm going to get out of debt. I'm going to pay off all my non-mortgage debt." You can sit down and you can get that done in less than a year in most cases.

Maybe for some it's a year and a half, but probably maximum 18 months. So set a goal. Get debt-free. I want you to imagine how simple and productive your life would be if you had no debt. How simple, how stress-free your life would be if you had no debt.

Remember that example I said earlier about making sure that if the guy who just saves money in his retirement accounts then spends all the rest of his money, you can do that when you're debt-free because you don't have to worry about paying anybody else off. So at some point in time, set a goal and say, "I'm going to get out of debt." And make it this year.

If you have non-mortgage debt, make it this year that I'm going to get out of debt. Just pay off all of your non-mortgage debt. If you can't do it easily in a year, then do the things that are necessary for you to accomplish it. So most of my listening audience can just decide to do it, start putting extra money at it and get after it.

Some people need to sell a car, some people need to sell a badly performing investment, some people need to get rid of some stuff. But just set a goal of this year being free of all debt and then resolve not to go into debt again in the future because then you'll be free.

Every year you'll be free. Debt-free is awesome. Debt-free is awesome. Make this be the year that you set a goal of getting rid of all of your non-mortgage debt and make it happen so that for the rest of your life you can live financially free, knowing that if you wanted to spend all of your money, you could responsibly do that because at least you're not beholden to the mistakes of the past or the overspending of the past, which is what debt is.

Quick comment on my distinction of non-mortgage debt versus mortgage debt. I think for many people, paying off mortgage debt is a smart idea. But mortgage debt can always be paid off by the sale of an asset. And so it doesn't cause you the same degree of lack of freedom as non-mortgage debt.

If you're living in Nashville, Tennessee, and you have a $400,000 mortgage on an $800,000 house and you decide you want to sell and move, you can sell the house, pay off the mortgage and move. That's different than if you're living in Nashville, Tennessee, and you've got $80,000 of credit card debt.

That's harder to deal with. So that's why I make the distinction between mortgage debt and non-mortgage debt is when you have debt backed by an asset, then anytime you want to get rid of the debt, you could just sell the asset. And so that is an option. It doesn't keep you as tied down as non-mortgage debt.

Now for a limited time at Delamo Motorsports. Get financing as low as 1.99% for 36 months on Select 2023 Can-Am Maverick X3. Considering the Mavericks taking home trophies everywhere from King of the Hammers to Uncle Ned's Backcountry Rally, you're not going to find a better deal on front row seats to a championship winner.

Don't lose out on your chance to get a Maverick X3. Visit Delamo Motorsports in Redondo Beach and get yours. Offer in soon. See dealer for details. Goal number four I want you to set for 2023 is this. I want you to fully fund all available retirement accounts. I repeat, I want you to fully fund, also known as max out, all available retirement accounts.

I want you to set that as your goal and I want you to accomplish it regardless of the effort of what it takes you to accomplish it. I want you to max out every one of your retirement accounts this year in the year 2023. Let me explain why this is so important.

If you only do this, this one thing of maxing out all available retirement accounts, if you only do this in virtually all circumstances, you will be set for your long-term wealth accumulation needs. The 2023 401k contribution limit in the United States of America is $22,500 for 2023. When you start running a financial calculator, let's just assume you're say 35 years old and let's assume we've got 30 years to invest.

Let's assume you make 7%. We start with no money. Let's just pretend we start with no money and we just put in $22,500 per year. By the way, I'm putting this in as level, no inflation adjustment, etc. At 65 years old, you would have $2 million. $2 million. That is a lot of money, a huge amount of money.

Now, it would actually be higher because if you maxed out your 401k, in most cases, you would have an employer match. So your total contribution would probably be more like something like $28,000 or $30,000 or more. And every year, this contribution limit is going to adjust. And so you're going to set a goal every year of maxing based upon that current calendar year contribution limit.

And oh, by the way, when you get to the catch-up contributions, now you get an extra, was it $6,500 that you can contribute. So now you're up to almost $30,000 going in. So you can have more and more and more. Even if you start late, right? Let's say that you are 50 years old and you have nothing saved for retirement.

Well, guess what? My answer is still going to be the same. Just set a goal of maxing out your retirement accounts. Because if you start late and you have nothing saved and you start saving at age 50, you're not going to retire at age 65. You're going to retire at 70 or 75, something longer.

But you'll get there very quickly by saving. And now you get the opportunity to do so-called catch-up contributions, right? You have a larger contribution limit. Now, what if you also have access to something like a Roth IRA or a spousal traditional IRA or something like that? Well, now you have even more.

So set yourself a goal of maxing out every available retirement account. Set that as a goal. And then make it happen. In order to make it happen, you might need to increase your income. In order to make it happen, you might need to decrease your expenses. But make it happen and do it every year.

If that were all the money you saved and that were the only thing you did for wealth building, if you just do that, you will be on track to be very rich in the fullness of time. It's such a clear, simple, tangible goal. Set it as a goal and make it happen.

Set a goal to max out every retirement account that is available to you. I want to emphasize again, these things scale to size, right? Let's say that you have a dual income family. Well, you might have two 401ks. You may be able to put money in two Roth IRAs.

That would be $55,000-ish going into retirement accounts. You can save more. Maybe you have a single income family. Well, guess what? You max out one 401k or you max out one and then you do one traditional IRA for your spouse. What if you don't have access to a 401k?

Well, usually, the reason you don't have access to a 401k is usually because you work in an industry where you have a lower earning threshold. So maybe you have an account you could put in $5,000 or all you can do is do Roth IRAs. Whatever is available to you, do what you can do.

Max out all available retirement accounts. Set that as a goal and make it happen. And if that were the only thing you do for your long-term wealth production, it's good enough. You don't need to save any more money. Let me extol the virtues of these accounts for just a moment.

Number one, these accounts are very tax efficient. Having the ability to put money into an account pre-tax is incredible. For a wage earner, it is the thing you can do to lower your taxes. So maximize it. More importantly, these accounts have great investment options, wonderful investment options. It's so easy to go to Vanguard or Fidelity or T.

Rowe Price or really almost anywhere and just open an account. If you have a 401k, undoubtedly you've got great investment options. The market is so competitive that it's hard to find an account that doesn't have good options in it now. And mutual funds that are locked up in a 401k where you can't touch them are some of the best managed mutual funds out there because you're not tempted to buy and sell and you're not tempted to tie in the market.

It can just sit there and grow as the economy grows over time. In addition, these accounts are completely protected from the claims of creditors with a few variations depending on states, depending on if you're talking about IRAs, 401ks, etc. But money that's in your 401k or in your pension plan is just golden.

It is protected from all but the super creditors of IRS or divorcing spouse. It is protected so it's really solid or really, really safe. So max out all available retirement accounts. Set that as a goal. If you have to rejigger your budget to make it happen, well, that's why we have the data.

That was goal number one. Collect the data. Goal number two is analyze it, right? Rejigger your data, rejigger your expenses, change something, move to a cheaper house, drive a cheaper car, something. Just set it as a non-negotiable. I'm the guy who maxes out my retirement accounts every year and do it.

Goal number five. Goal number five is this. I want you to set a goal to increase your income by 20%. Increase your income by 20%. There's nothing magical about my 20% number. In thinking about it, I just chose this and I'll explain why I chose it. But if you have a slightly different number, that's fine.

The key thing is I want you to be focused on increasing your income. But I think 20% is a useful way of thinking. As you know, I often use larger numbers. I talk about doubling your income, tripling your income, 10x-ing your income. I think those ways of thinking are really powerful because you can't just do more and 5x your income or 10x your income.

You have to transform. You have to redesign. And sometimes that's easier. But I also know there's a significant portion of my listening audience that is a little overwhelmed by thinking of how do I triple my income. You can't triple your income at a job. It's not going to happen.

You're going to have to get a different job or retrain for another job in your company, et cetera. You can't do it. But that doesn't mean you have to just sit back and just accept a cost of living raise. Remember, with high inflation, your wages need to be keeping up with inflation significantly.

So let's say 7%, 10%, depending on the inflation rate where you live. So you need at least to keep up with inflation if at all possible. But set a goal of a 20% increase and then ask yourself, how can I be worth a 20% increase in pay? 20% is feasible, I think, for many people, especially when you look at it over the course of a year, a one-year project.

How can I produce more? How can I make my company more money? How can I connect more? How can I shore up my weaknesses and really enhance my strengths? Set yourself a goal of increasing your income by 20% and then brainstorm how you can do it in your specific opportunity.

Increasing your income is not always feasible. It's not always even the right move. Frequently, I'll work with private consulting clients and I'll say, "You shouldn't be worried about increasing your income. It's not there right now." So it's not always the right move, but it is almost always the right thing to focus on in financial planning first and foremost.

So many people in financial planning live in a world of scarcity. I have to budget more. I have to save more, etc. That's fine. It's good. But the secret path to having a richer and more enjoyable life now while also building your plan for financial freedom faster is increasing your income.

That's where you have the best of both worlds. If you could increase your income by 20%, you could save half, spend half, wind up getting richer faster while also living better now. And you can do it again. And you can do it again. And you can do it again.

And recognize if you increase your income by 20%, you'll have doubled your income very, very quickly. If you increase your income by 20%, in five years, you'll have doubled your income. And in 10 years, you will have 5x'd your income if you could repeat it every single year. So focus on this.

I know there are a very small subset of listeners saying, "Joshua, Joshua, it's too much. It's too much. It's too much." Okay, maybe it is. Maybe you can't accomplish it. Maybe you can't. But if you target increasing your income by 20% and you hit increasing your income by 13%, isn't that better than what you would if you weren't thinking about it?

If you target your income, increasing your income by 20%, and you recognize you can't do it at your current company, you can't do it in your current job, and you spend the next two years job hunting and retraining and recredentialing and whatnot, and you find up getting a job where you do have the chance of doing it, hopefully a job that you like better than the one you're not doing, then you don't...

Excuse me, I'm getting tongue-tied. The point is, work for it. Imagine it. Set it as a goal. Write it out every day. Exactly how much you earned is 20% higher than where you are. It's going to put you on the track for success. There are many other goals that you could set, but I wanted to give you five simple ones that I think are applicable to everyone.

By way of review, goal number one, build an intelligent financial tracking system. Make sure that you build for yourself an intelligent, simple financial tracking system that will give you the data that you need to know about your life. Goal number two, analyze your data. Set yourself a goal of actually sitting down and looking at your numbers.

Where am I? Plug some numbers into an online retirement calculator. Figure out, just look at some stuff. Analyze it. I like to do it monthly. Make yourself a monthly financial planning meeting. Sit down on maybe a Sunday afternoon in your home office, or maybe it's Monday morning, the first Monday of the work week.

You go into the office an hour early or something, and pick one category to explore, one thing to think about, one thing to research, et cetera. Goal number three, set a goal to pay off all non-mortgage debt. If you have any non-mortgage debt, set a goal to pay off all non-mortgage debt.

Goal number four, set a goal to fully fund your retirement accounts. If you just fully fund your retirement accounts, you're going to be rich. Then goal number five is set a goal to increase your income by 20%. Set a goal to increase your income by 20%. If you picked one of these, you're going to be in a better situation.

Any one of them will massively improve your situation. If you did all five of these, a year from now, two years from now, three years from now, you'll be on the fast track to wealth. These are simple, doable, practicable, and practical goals that you can set. Thank you so much for listening.

I hope that you have enjoyed this. Remember, price increase on January 31 at HackProofCourse. So go to HackProofCourse.com. Sign up. Make sure you're in the live cohort coming in February. HackProofCourse.com. I'll see you there. HackProofCourse.com. Sweet Hop is an online marketplace curating the best in premium seating at stadiums, arenas, and amphitheaters nationwide.

With Sweet Hop's 100% ticket guarantee, no hidden fees, and the personal high-level service you expect with a premium purchase, you can relax knowing you'll receive the luxury experience you deserve. Visit SweetHop.com today to book your premium tickets to your favorite teams, artists, and all the must-see live events to Sweet Hop around LA.

S-U-I-T-E-H-O-P.com. It's more than just a ticket. Hey, cricket customers. Max with ads is included with your cricket $60 unlimited plan at no additional cost. Max is the streaming platform where you can watch Scoob, Meg 2 The Trench, The Nightmare on Elm Street Collection, and so much more. Remember me.

Just log in with your cricket username and password to experience Max on all your favorite devices. We've never seen this before. Max, the one to watch for a good scream with cricket. Phone plans, streams, and standard definition. Programming subject to change. Fees, terms, and restrictions apply. See cricketwireless.com for details.