Know Your Target

Financial clarity creates confidence, and confidence creates progress.

If you’re new here, welcome to The BOLD Life. Each week I write about building wealth in money and in life, because the goal was never just a bigger number in an account. It’s a life that actually feels rich. If someone sent this your way, I’d love for you to subscribe.

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In April of 2023, a woman named Betty Glover finally retired. Not at sixty-five, not at seventy. She was ninety-one. She had spent seven decades in the workforce, and for her last ten years of working, into her eighties and then her nineties, she was still scanning groceries at a store in Oregon because she had no way to stop. She was not working to have a purpose or to stay sharp. She was working because she never built the security to walk away. The only reason she got to hang up her apron is that strangers on the internet raised eighty-two thousand dollars so she could afford food and medicine without standing at a register to earn it.

Nobody plans to end up there. What actually happens is you go through life without taking the time to examine where you stand, in this case, financially. You check your accounts, you feel more or less fine, and you move on without ever asking whether “fine” is actually enough. That is not a financial failure. It is a drift, the same drift we have talked about in this newsletter before, and ignoring your number is one of its easiest forms. Addressing it feels harder than avoiding it, right up until the years make the choice for you.

Wherever you are and whatever is currently sitting in your accounts, you very likely have more time than Betty did before her GoFundMe Hail Mary at 91. Time, paired with compounding, is still available to you. But it only works if you start now, not five years from now. Step one in moving toward any goal is figuring out what the goal actually is.

Photo by Ricardo Arce on Unsplash

Money is a tool, not the goal. The whole point of building wealth is to buy yourself options, freedom, and time for the people and pursuits that actually matter to you. But you cannot trade money for those things if you do not understand your own money. The first step is knowing your target.

A few months ago, we talked about your net worth, your financial baseline. That number tells you where you stand today. But real transformation begins when you decide where you want to go. Your values guide your reasons for wanting to build wealth. Your time reveals how you want to live your life. Now comes the piece that ties it together, the target that turns direction into destination.

What gets measured gets done. What gets defined gets achieved.

A Kid With a Notebook

When I was seventeen, I started tracking my net worth in a notebook. It was not impressive, a few thousand dollars and college tuition still ahead of me. But writing it down gave me something I did not have before: direction.

We did not grow up with much money, and I had one goal: to be financially rich. I had no grand plan, just motivation. Study hard, get into the best college I could, and move up from there. Over time, I learned something that has held up for thirty years: sustained grit is a superpower.

Tracking my net worth became the habit that shaped my financial direction. Every dollar saved, every loan paid off, every investment made became visible progress. Without that awareness, we drift, spending reactively with no eye toward the future. But when you measure something, you manage it. That notebook was the first step toward building my financial life on purpose instead of by accident.

A Quick Recap: Calculating Your Net Worth

If you have not done this yet, here’s the simple version. List your assets: cash, retirement and brokerage accounts, the market value of your home, rental properties, business assets, and your car at a realistic value. List your liabilities: mortgage, car loans, student loans, credit cards, and any business debt. Subtract the liabilities from the assets. That number is your net worth and the starting point for everything else in this post. We did a more in-depth walkthrough of how to calculate your own net worth a few months ago.

Why Most People Avoid Setting a Target

People fear financial clarity, not because they do not care, but because clarity forces accountability. They fear the number will be too big, so they never write it down. They fear it will be too small, so they avoid looking. They fear the change a real target demands, since new habits feel uncomfortable even when they are good for you. But that fear disappears once clarity shows up. Define your target, and the path becomes visible; once it is, action gets easier.

Write It Down

SMART goals, specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, time-bound, are a useful framework, but they miss something essential: the physical act of writing your goal down on paper. Studies show that writing down your goals makes you roughly 42 percent more likely to achieve them. A written goal stops being wishful thinking and starts becoming part of your identity.

Start with a logical checkpoint: five or ten years from now, a milestone birthday, the year your kids leave for college, the moment you want to be work optional, the age you want to retire. Short-term goals build momentum; long-term goals create direction. You do not need a perfect plan from day one, just a clear destination and the willingness to take consistent steps toward it.

My first real target grew out of exactly this kind of thinking. At 21, with my net worth still sitting in the tens of thousands, I set out to hit seven figures by 27. The goal was SMART; it was on paper, and it sat in the background of my mind for the next six years. Some of that early growth came from a lucky win in the stock market, a small-cap stock that got bought out. But luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. If I had spent that first few thousand dollars on a nicer car instead of leaving it invested, I never would have been in a position to get lucky.

We started our building company around the same time I set that goal, just the two of us framing houses for other builders, sunup to sundown. Every hour I worked, I saw as another dollar I could invest. I lived cheaply, saved aggressively, and let the compounding take over. I still have the net worth statement from the day before my 27th birthday. I had hit my target exactly.

Did I go spend it all in celebration? Of course not. I probably ate pasta and Ragu that night and quietly set my next target instead. I knew bigger plans were ahead, and money only works for you if you let it keep compounding. Compound interest has been called the most powerful force in the universe for a reason.

Reverse Engineering Retirement

Start with a simple question: how much money will I need each year to live comfortably? A general rule of thumb is that you can safely withdraw about 4 percent of your investable assets each year. If you want 80,000 dollars a year beyond Social Security, you need roughly 2 million dollars saved, since 4 percent of 2 million is 80,000. That is your target, clear, measurable, specific.

Mapping the Plan

Once you have your number, the next question is how you actually get there, and this is where a lot of people stall out. Turning a target into a monthly action feels complicated, but it does not have to be.

Take your number, your timeline, and a reasonable expected return, and you can reverse-engineer exactly how much you need to save and invest each month to arrive on time. You do not need a financial model or a spreadsheet built from scratch. Open any AI tool and ask a version of this question: If I need $ 2 million in 20 years and I am starting from zero, how much do I need to invest monthly at an 8 percent average return to get there? You will have a real, specific number in seconds.

That number becomes your new habit. Not a wish, not a someday, a monthly action you can actually take starting this week.

Living the BOLD Life Financially

At this point, you have two pieces of clarity: your net worth, which is your starting line, and your financial goal, which is your finish line. When you know where you are and where you want to go, you can finally build the path between them. Financial wealth is not an accident. It is built with intention, clarity, and consistent action, and when you combine these with values and purpose, you create a life rich in money and meaning.

Your Turn

You do not need to share your number. Write it down for yourself and keep it somewhere you will see it.

But tell me this in the comments. What is your number for? Is it retirement? A life of freedom to work on your own terms? Paying for your kids’ college? Something else entirely?

The number is just math. The why is what makes you actually chase it.

We build financial wealth not for status or scorekeeping, but to use it as a tool to fuel the areas of life that matter most. Family. Health. Growth. Generosity. Joy. That is what it means to build a life rich in both money and meaning.

Minor in money. Major in life.

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The BOLD Life is for people who want to build wealth without losing themselves in the process. People who want their success to strengthen their health, relationships, purpose, and freedom rather than compete with them. If that’s the kind of life you’re building, you’re in the right place. If you’re new here, welcome. Start with The Blueprint of a BOLD Life to get a feel for the framework, then read whatever draws your attention. Every post stands on its own.

Don’t drift. Live boldly.

P.S. You do not need the perfect plan today. You need a why. Start there.