Establishing Goals And Dreams

Yesterday I posted a recap of 2012.

Mr SMG looks up from his iPad in surprise that I finally updated this blog, reads it and then grumbles about how going snowboarding in Canada and Colorado is unfeasible due to our commitments and plans for 2013. It is rather disappointing to know that we may be missing a few snowboarding seasons.

We will be going away to Singapore in a few weeks time, having returned from Europe not long ago. So can't afford to jet off to multiple holidays plus an overseas wedding in addition to buying a freakingly expensive house in Sydney.

I'm rather trepidacious about the potentially monstrous mortgage and have compiled several what-if worse case scenarios if anything goes wrong - what I'll liquidate first (the emergency funds in the mortgage offset), liquidate secondly (my stock portfolio and his managed funds) and liquidate as last resort (my apartment).

I'm being overly dramatic though. We can still afford the potential house mortgage for approximately two years with both of us not earning any direct income from employment before we hit the wall and need to liquidate the illiquid assets such as my apartment. So yeah, haven't bought the house yet but have already crunched the various scenarios into a pile of crumbs already. 

So here are my rough goals(again) going forward into 2013, reposted with edits:

1. Something massive x 2 (could I be more 007 like? lol)
2. Buy a house
3. If time+budget+life permits, travel South East Asia (Thailand/Cambodia/Vietnam)
4. Work on side hobbies (photo props/card designs/iPhone apps) and get them launched

Just remembered that I also did a recap of 2011 goals which you can read about here.

Oddly enough, the goals that I hadn't fully achieved in 2011 were all achieved in 2012.

The goals that I haven't fully achieved in 2012 will undoubtedly be achieved in 2013.


Below is a how-to guide on how to set goals and objectives if you don't know how or you wish to learn how. Remember, that all goals must meet the S.M.A.R.T criterias of being specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely. You can always sneak in some pie-in-the-sky goals like I always do...you just never know what may come true ;)

Setting Goals And Objectives:


1. What do you want to achieve in the long term 5-10 years from now?
2. What do you want to achieve in the medium term 3-5 years from now to achieve your long term goals?
3. What do you need to do in the short term, today-3 years time to achieve your medium and long term goals?
4. Establish your dreams and goals for various categories such as: family, friends, personal relationship, career, health, finances. For each of those categories, break them down into what you want for the long term and what you need to do in the short to medium term in order to realistically achieve those long term goals.

Note that the time periods are just a guidance and you don't have to set long term, 10 year goals.

However Robert Kiyosaki writes that you need to start off with what and where you want to be in 5-10 years time before you know what you need to do for the next few years to get to where you want to be. (It's blatantly obvious that I've been reading Kiyosaki's books eh?!)

Example Of How To Set Your Goals

A friend of mine tells me that he wants to buy a house. I asked him when does he hope to buy one? He says he doesn't know when and he's got no idea when or how he can afford one. I asked him a few questions to sort out what he wants:
* Which area does he like and wish to buy a house in? Coastal
* What type of house does he want? At least 3 bedrooms, 1 bathroom and 1 carpark
* What are the prices of houses like that in the area he wants to buy in? $500,000

From those answers, we deduced that:
1. He'll need to save up 20% of $500,000 as a deposit
2. He'll need to save up 5% of $500,000 for the miscellaneous expenses such as legal fees, stamp duty, mortgage duty, pest and building inspections, settlement fees etc
3. Therefore he'll need to save up at least $125,000 to buy a house
4. How much can he save each week? $125,000 divided by what he can save weekly or monthly will determine how long it will take him to realistically achieve his long term goal. 

Example: If he can save $800 per week, then his goals would look something like:
$125,000/$800 = 156 weeks worth of savings = 3 years worth of saving

1. Long term goal-  buy a $500,000 house in 3 years time
2. Medium term - save up at least  $41,666 annually
3. Short term - save up $800 per week     

 So instead of drifting along with the idea that he wants to buy a house in the near future, he can set realistic goals and KNOW that he can buy one in three years time IF he saves $800 weekly. 

Chalet Girl: Kim and her financial struggle

Chalet Girl is a romantic, snowboarding chick flick. I found myself watching a chick flick mid-week because when times are tough- we all need to de-stress ourselves somehow and snowboarding videos or random movies are some of my favourite past times next to reading and raiding the fridge for food.

If you want to watch a movie about how not to handle your dough, Chalet Girl is the movie to watch. It's about a girl, Kim Matthews who used to be a competitive skateboarder until her mother died. Since then, she and her father have been unable to recover from the trauma emotionally nor financially. A few years have passed and we find Kim working in a dead end job, living in an untidy house with a slob of a father. I can understand if her father became a slob due to the death of her mother however as the movie plays out, that's not the case.

When Kim leaves to work for three months at a private chalet, there are scenes of her father not knowing how to reheat food, wash up nor clean up after himself. He eats frozen food, directly from the freezer because he doesn't know how to defrost nor reheat. It's pretty gross. By implications of this, he's a 50 to 60 year old, long term unemployed father who doesn't even know the basics of domestic life. His wife and his daughter has really done him a disservice by mothering and babying him. He's like a grown up who needs his nappies changed. As I mentioned previously, simply gross. Fortunately there is redemption in his character once his daughter ditches him for a temporary job on the ski slopes.

The movie is set in the Alps and every scenery shot simply makes me drool. The mountains are beautiful, the slopes look amazing and the terrain parks are awesome looking. There's a huge bouncing air mattress at the end of one jumping ramp and I soooo want to try that out. Our friend TJ injured himself on one of those bouncing mattresses because the strap on his snowboard broke when he landed. Ouch.

For those who are keen on skiing or snowboarding, it's a movie that will bring back memories of when you first started to learn. I was commiserating with Ed Westwick's character Jonny when he learnt how to snowboard because we've all been there and done that. Face plant, head plant and whiplashes when the edges of the snowboard catches.

Even the injuries in the movie were unfortunately all too familiar. Various friends of mine have been carted off on medical snowcats with hospital trips made. We all keep doing it despite our various injuries. We keep pushing ourselves to try bigger jumps and steeper runs. Through trees and rocks and God knows what. Some of us have broken an arm, fractured shoulders, cartileges, torn our ligaments, broken wrist, fractured knee, sprained ankles, injured backs, slight concussions and so forth. Several of them are popping neurofens, panadols, panadene forts and pain killers every single morning before heading out to the mountains. It's like a pharmacy in their suitcases.

So Kim finds herself working as a caterer in a swanky chalet which is ski in, ski out. Her employers are a wealthy American family with two sons. One of them is sleazy and gives me the creeps. The other one, Jonny, is not too bad although almost just as sleazy as his brother. How could he just ditch his fiance on the very night of their engagement party? And that's after he slept with Kim for several days. His character isn't convincing enough. It's the case of 'rich boy falling for a poor girl' but from what we see, they don't really have much in common except for their joy of the snow.

It's unrealistic for the movie to finish up the way it did. Any keen snowboarder would know that it takes years and years to even do the tricks that Kim learnt with just three months on the snow. Even if she had a skateboarding background. Being able to do all those boxes and rails not to mention 1020s and 360s etc all take years and years of practice. And to beable to compete competitively after only three months? Okay okay, it's a movie and I know I should 'suspend my disbelief' and let movies stretch the truth every now and then.

Now onto the topic of Kim and her personal finance skills or lack thereof. She's been working in a dead end job and she needed more roster hours however her boss couldn't give her more work hours so she applied
for a temporary 3 month role to get her out of her rut. Her father hasn't been working so she's been supporting the pair of them. She should have asked him to help find work so that he could contribute to the household finances instead of soldiering on alone and stressed. Being emotionally depressed and distraught due to trauma is understandable but life goes on and he can't expect her to support him indefinitely. He is still her father but he was heavily lacking in that fatherly role. She shouldn't have carried the burden for so long. That was an erroneous judgement on her behalf.

While she was working at the chalet, she received tip money but then was cajoled into blowing the lot on a night in the pub/club. We see her buying rounds and rounds of alchohol. Viewers know that she's got bills to pay at home because we see her father asking her when she'll be depositing the funds. I don't blame her. She's been looking after his sorry ass for a long time and finally decides to live in the moment and screw responsibility. She does take her devil may care attitude a bit further as she splashes out on snow gear, clothing and a hot new snowboard. Sure the prize money is $25k but then again, this movie does make a lot of assumptions in terms of her snowboarding skills.

Working in a chalet and being introduced into the high life, her horizons are constantly expanding. She has the opportunity to go heli skiing twice. Five friends of mine went heli skiing two months ago in New Zealand and it was about $750-$900 for the day which involves about 7 runs down the mountain in almost untracked terrain. They said it was an awesome experience.

Anyhoo, the movie had the typical ending of an American film. Kim triumphs. She even embraces Jonny when she sees him for the first time since she realised he cheated, Jonny's father is smiling at Jonny and Kim's embrace and even Kim's father finds romance. It's all so unrealistic that it comes together like that because real life just doesn't flow that way. Movie critics label those type of endings derogatively as the 'big finish'. It was an enjoyable movie simple because of all the snowboarding and skiing scenes. It's not going to be like the Art of Flight or specialty snowboarding films because it's a chick flick and it was a decent enough romance movie.