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In Australia, and many other countries less than 5% of the population reach retirement able to support themselves, without government or family assistance. If you want to be one of them, then now is the best time to start striving toward financial security. 4. Learn to Set Goals.

Most self made, successful business people and investors have achieved their success by planning to do so.

They have set goals for themselves and achieved them. They invest time in reading and learning about wealth creation and are happy to learn from other people’s mistakes and experiences, as well as their own. They set goals, and realise that they will be far better able to achieve them if they familiarise themselves with the ways in which other people acted and the things that others have done to succeed. Wealthy people create wealth by carefully utilising the income that they have available to them to their best advantage. They know that working harder and longer hours is not the way to achieve financial freedom, instead they have to utilise what they have, and make it grow.

Having a goal enables you to focus your energies on devising ways to achieve it. When someone makes a decision and begins focusing on achieving a specific goal (and even better in a specific period of time), the powerful subconscious mind goes to work and begins playing with ideas and developing strategies of various ways to bring about the successful completion of the goal.

When you set yourself a goal both your conscious and subconscious start working on it and begin to develop an action plan. You will begin asking yourself questions about what needs to be done to enable you to reach your goal. Many find themselves coming up with amazing ideas and solutions to problems or obstacles that have been in the way of achieving their goal. The subconscious is an extremely powerful tool. The more often you remind yourself of your goal, the more your mind will work on ways for you to achieve it. Some people find answers come to them when they are asleep and dreaming.

• Have you ever noticed that there is no correlation between being wealthy and having a high IQ or a university degree? If there were, every doctor and university graduate would be wealthy, and as statistics show, most of them end up in the same situation as 95% of the population.
• Setting Goals helps you to focus your energy on developing workable strategies. Setting long term goals helps you look at the big picture. Once you can see the big picture, you can develop small sub goals. Sub goals are small simple goals that can be followed one step at a time. When you progressively achieve your sub goals, you will get closer and closer to your major goals. Goals are simply plans to succeed. It is said that if you “Fail to plan, then you plan to fail”. Goals help you keep motivated. Progressively achieving your goals can lead to a wonderful feeling of fulfilment.
• 5. Learn how to Budget.

Budgeting does not have to be tedious. All you need to do is to work out:

• What your incomings are. What your regular outgoings are and then make sure that all of your other expenditure is less than the amount remaining. This will allow you to start saving and investing. Budgeting puts you in control of your finances.
• 6. Learn about investing – in particular about property investing.