Saving $3,000 A Month Can Be Impossible, So Why Do We Keep Trying To Do It?

How to best understand the differences between goals and objectives

I write about never retiring and, subsequently, being semi-retired as an alternative to traditional retirement, in part because I found it impossible to work and save at the level necessary to quit work altogether in relative old age.

The idea of saving thousands of dollars each month — for like 30 years or so — stresses me out.

There’s a halfway decent chance you can relate.

Traditional retirement — as a long-term goal — requires a primary objective of saving a ton of money every single month for something in the neighborhood of 360 months. That is if we use 30 years as the time it’ll take you to get there, which I think is pretty standard.

Think about that for a second.

Just reading it phrased that way drives home the reality of the situation and makes it feel insurmountable. Because it is. We’re in the middle of a retirement meets housing crisis. And I’m not happy with most of the answer on why we’re here. Even some of the answers I have explored in previous articles. Because most of these answers fail to address — head on — the psychological and just relatively intangible factors that drive our concrete strategies.

For my partner and I, the long-term solution to the problem of living in urban America is to move to Spain, hopefully sometime late next year. This, followed by purchasing an apartment there, are the two primary end goals. We have a laundry list of objectives to check off prior to achieving those goals.

• Work objectives
• Money objectives
• Logistical objectives

So many objectives in each category that it can feel overwhelming. But it — or whatever you’re striving for — doesn’t have to be overwhelming if you properly vision and address your goals and objectives.

Of course, we often confuse goals and objectives.

Goals are outcomes you want to achieve.

Objectives are specific, measurable actions you can/need to take on the way to a goal.

That’s important.

However, more important is putting both of these things in their proper place.

After many years of trial and error — or trial and some success — I have come to two key conclusions:

• Set goals, then forget them. Sort of like the set it and forget it approach to personal finance.

If you aim to save $100 the goal becomes practically meaningless until you’ve met your objective of saving $25 a month. Even that $25 a month is a mini-goal — and ultimately a meaningless one — if you don’t meet the objective of, say, not buying delivery once a week to get there. Not meaningless in the practical sense, but meaningless in the way it helps to approach things psychologically on the way to the goal.

Yeah, my girlfriend and I have a goal to move to Valencia. However, once we have completed every objective on our list to actually do it, the goal, to some degree, doesn’t matter. We have the resources we need and can do — within reason — pretty much whatever we want.

Think of it as positioning yourself as best as possible — financially or otherwise — merely because it makes sense, absent any defined goal.

• Set short-term, ideally something like 1- or 2–year goals fronted by bite-sized objectives you can measure weekly, bi-weekly and monthly.

This gets us back to the saving $3,000-a-month for 360 months impossibility. A goal that far out with such a lofty objective (or mini-goal) sets endless numbers of people up to “fail.” Which is why the retirement crisis absolutely is not made up of a bunch of individual failures. It’s a collective failure of a system asking and expecting us to do the impossible, while ignoring the psychological relationship many people have with money.

If you think more critically about goals and objectives and how you set them, how you time frame them and the differences and relationships between the two, you’re ultimately tailoring whatever strategies you come up with to your personality, preferences and tendencies.

You might also make yourself more patient in pursuit of what you want.

A 30-year out goal is enough to make anyone impatient. It’s so difficult to do things today for the person you’ll be in 30 years. You don’t know that person so it’s really hard to focus on that person. You shouldn’t be made to feel less than — like a failure — for this natural way of being.

Instead, you should be applauded for finding an alternative path that works for you.

I’m most comfortable with the two-year series of goals with mini-goals and objectives hitting at regular intervals along the way. If I can execute in each of my two-year periods, the cumulative effect over 30 years should produce impressive results.

The goals don’t always have to be big.

For me, it’s move to Spain within a year or two. Within a year or two of that, buy an apartment. Maybe the goals after that are much less ambitious.

I don’t know. I’ll know when I get there. Which is also another key factor unrealistic long-term planning fails to adequately take into account.

If you bite size it, you won’t find yourself locked into a strategy you’re so knee deep into you feel guilty about getting out of or adjusting. If you have demanding parents or snobby, judgmental friends, it can make things all the more challenging. It’s better to buck the trend from the word go.

This doesn’t mean you don’t do anything conventionally with money. It works for a lot of people. There’s nothing wrong with ending up with a million bucks at age 65 if you can somehow pull it off.

However, there’s also nothing wrong with not having anything close to that and — deciding, like I did — when you’re in your mid-forties to save what you can to move across the world for a life better suited to your cultural and lifestyle tastes.

To do things backwards — like not save for retirement, budget differently than the crowd and buy the house last, or later, in life.

We’re in retirement and housing crises not because we’re all a bunch of fools acting in isolation. We’re in these crises because we’re conditioned to believe there’s something wrong with us, not the commonly prescribed approach. So we stubbornly adhere to what hasn’t worked and what we know — not so deep down — is unlikely to ever work.

Once you change this deeply entrenched mindset, it’s much easier to get on with the real — and rewarding — work of finding out what actually works for you, how and why.

If you’d like to know more about the journey I’m on, follow me on Medium.

You can also subscribe to my Never Retire: Living The Semi-Retired Life newsletter where I chronicle my big decisions on lifestyle, housing and cost of living, which includes moving to Spain sooner rather than later.

This article is for informational purposes only. It should not be considered Financial or Legal Advice. Not all information will be accurate. Consult a financial professional before making any major financial decisions.