How to Make Financial Goals Part of Your Daily Routine

Posted on December 30, 2025 by Business Development Rep Samantha

New Year’s resolutions can be easy to make, but hard to keep – especially without a plan in place. If your resolutions include financial goals, integrating simple habits into your daily routine to achieve them might be easier than you think. Here are steps you can take to make financial goals part of your daily routine, and why those steps matter.

Why Daily Habits Matter for Financial Success

Adding a new routine activity, no matter how big or small – into your already busy day might seem daunting. However, completing simple, achievable daily steps is one of the key actions you can take to reach your goals. This consistency will build discipline and confidence, and you will eventually consider these habits a “non-negotiable” part of your day. Furthermore, breaking a large goal into “bite-size” pieces can make that goal feel more attainable – as well as provide frequent checkpoints for tracking your progress.

Step 1: Clearly Define Your Goals and the Motivation Behind Them

An achievable goal is one that is clearly defined. A common framework for goalsetting is called SMART goals – which can help you create specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goals. Many goals fail because they are ambiguous, making it difficult to monitor progress and leaving you uncertain in how to achieve them. Additionally, goals can fail if they are clearly out of reach or you don’t have the means to achieve them given your current lifestyle. For example, if your goal is to save $1,000 a month but you only have $500 left after paying your monthly expenses – you might become discouraged from saving at all. SMART goals take uncertainty away to help ensure you cross the finish line.

If your goal is to pay off debt, you are more likely to have a successful outcome if it is structured as follows: “I will pay off $5,000 of credit card debt by December 31, 2026 by making a $208 payment plus interest every payday from the first payday of the year.” This goal is specific by mentioning the amount and type of debt, measurable every payday, and time-bound by setting a target payoff date. Click here to learn more about using SMART goals to achieve positive outcomes.

Another important part of setting goals is considering your why. Do you want to become debt free so you can purchase a home? Do you want to curb your impulse purchases to put more money toward your emergency fund? Your why will help you focus on the bigger picture.

Step 2: Personalize Your Routine with Daily, Weekly, and Monthly Habits

Personalizing your routine by creating daily, weekly, and monthly habits will make you more likely to reach your goals. Taking small actions in different frequencies will help make your goals feel attainable and easier for your current routine to accommodate new habits.

Let’s return to the financial goal of paying off $5,000 of credit card debt. A daily habit can be setting aside 5 minutes every morning to review your spending to ensure you’re on track to make your credit card payment. A weekly habit can be reviewing your budget to see if you have any upcoming expenses to plan for that could impact your debt repayment plan. A monthly habit can be reviewing your progress toward paying off the credit card – which gives you a chance to celebrate the progress you’ve made and stay motivated.

Step 3: Use Tools That Work for You

There are many tools out there claiming they will help you track your goals and create better money habits. While that may be true, the best tools to help you reach your goals are the ones you will actually use. If the thought of tracking your spending with a spreadsheet doesn’t excite you, deciding to use one might do more harm than good. Your success won’t necessarily come from a fancy budgeting app – it will come from the tools you use that make it easy to show up and work toward your goals every day.

Step 4: Automate When Possible

Automating your habits can help you make progress toward your goals even on the busy days. Back to the credit card example – setting up an automatic, recurring payment to your credit card can help make sure you never miss a payment.

Step 5: Hold Yourself Accountable, but Realize Progress isn’t Always Linear

Accountability is another important component of integrating financial goals into your routine. By checking in with yourself or a trusted individual, you can identify potential shortcomings early, come up with a plan to get back on track, and avoid shying away from uncomfortable conversations. Progress isn’t always linear – you might make great strides one week but fall short the next, and that’s okay! Be sure to celebrate your successes, and don’t be too hard on yourself if you don’t quite meet the mark one week.

If you live, work, worship, volunteer, or attend school in Monmouth or Ocean Counties and one of your financial goals in the new year is joining a credit union – get started in one of our local branches today, or give us a call at 732.312.1500.

The First Financial team wishes you continued success in the new year!

4 Power Tips for Achieving Your Financial Goals

Posted on February 9, 2018 by Chief Marketing Officer Jessica

Power Tip #1: Harness the Power of Loss Aversion.

Loss aversion is the principle that we humans are often motivated (or discouraged) by the threat of negative outcomes. If positive motivation isn’t working, try negative motivation. Poor financial choices don’t always have an immediate negative impact, but you can create one. For example, you could bet on your ability to follow through with the necessary steps to reach a financial goal. Losing money — especially to something you dislike or someone you rival, can be powerfully motivating.

Power Tip #2: Bring in the Power of Accountability.

Accountability to ourselves isn’t as motivating as accountability to others — whether it’s a friend, sibling or member of a group you belong to. If you don’t have a personal network, use fitness and financial apps to draw on a more public social network. It’s amazing how much motivation can spring from “competing” with strangers trying to achieve the same goals!

Power Tip #3: Take Willpower Out of the Equation.

We often think willpower (or motivation) is integral to achieving financial goals. If we fail, we must not have enough of it. Some willpower is necessary for taking the first step and gaining momentum toward our goals, but its tendency to fluctuate (much like our emotions), means we can’t count on it to drive us to completion.

With other disciplines, such as healthy eating or exercising, willpower is more of a constant battle until new habits are formed. With finances, it’s easier to eliminate willpower because you can draw on the help of technology — through automation.

Automatic savings and payments aren’t exactly set-it-and-forget-it categories, because you should still check in on your finances – but they only require one dose of willpower to get them going. Try it. You’ll be surprised how much more you can achieve by just having an automated schedule.

Power Tip #4: Focus on the Power of One Goal.

Another reason we often fail to achieve our financial goals is that they’re goals (plural), versus a goal (singular). Pick the biggest area of opportunity, the easiest one to achieve, or the one you feel most excited about — whichever strategy works best for you. Having a singular focus for the year is less stressful and daunting while allowing you to dedicate more of your resources and attention to perfecting it, rather than just barely hitting the mark.

There are different kinds of power, and they play into the success or failure of our financial goals in surprising ways.

Need help setting your financial goals? Make an appointment at your nearest branch location, email marketingbd@firstffcu.com, or call 732-312-1500.

Article Source: Jessica Sommerfield for Moneyning.com

6 Tips for Making Fiscal Fitness Goals Stick

Posted on April 18, 2017 by Chief Marketing Officer Jessica

If you often struggle with setting financial goals and making them stick throughout the year, try these six tips.

1. Use the SMART principle.

The acronym SMART is a good way to remember an effective strategy for setting your fiscal finance goals. Make them specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-specific. In other words, instead of deluding yourself that you’ll completely overhaul years of poor money management, start to tackle it in bite-size portions. Keeping goals specific also makes them seem more real and tangible than the undefined “improving my financial fitness.”

2. Incorporate the new practice into your routine.

Science shows we are creatures of habit. Once something is part of our routine, even if it’s an unpleasant task, we don’t seem to mind it as much. Getting to that point requires making a deliberate effort to incorporate new financial habits into your routine. To make this step easier, set up reminders on your smartphone calendar for specific times and dates you’ll set aside to address various aspects of your finances, whether it’s daily, weekly, or monthly.

3. Keep doing it – repetition leads to habit.

The more frequently you perform a new financial task as part of your routine, the sooner it becomes a habit – something that doesn’t require any willpower. That’s the trick.

4. Don’t judge yourself for failures – expect them.

Half the battle of following through with new goals of any kind is how you handle failure. If we were to ask the people who succeed at sticking to their goals what their secret was, you can almost guarantee it involves expecting and accounting for failure. Instead of hoping you won’t fail, plan to fail. That may seem pessimistic, but it’s more realistic than thinking you’ll be perfect! After all, we’re just human. It’s what you do after you fall that makes the difference between permanent failure at financial goals and long-term success.

5. Give yourself some wiggle room to account for slacking off.

You should create some wiggle room into your fiscal fitness improvement plans. Round up or down, schedule a “slack” day or two, and don’t make plans that are too rigid or that depend too heavily on your own consistency. This will take some of the pressure off and allow you to move forward even if you are taking a step back every once in a while.

6. Hold yourself accountable.

Even as you expect to fail and leave yourself some room to slack off, don’t go to the opposite extreme of approaching your fiscal fitness goals without purposefulness. One of the best ways to hold yourself accountable is to make your intentions public and ask others to support you. There’s power in numbers. Just as it’s easier to commit to a 5 a.m. workout if you have someone by your side, it’s easier to change the numbers that determine your financial fitness when you use the buddy system.

Instead of refusing to make financial goals because you’ll inevitably fail, use the expectation of failure, along with these tips, to move beyond that cycle this year. Gradually and deliberately improve your financial well-being and turn that ship around toward financial success.

Article Source: Jessica Sommerfield for MoneyNing.com