Pod Insights The Personal Finance Podcast Why You Keep Failing at Money Goals (And the Simple System That Fixes It) About this episode Join the Free Master Your Money Workshop on January 14, 2026 here!
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In this episode of The Personal Finance Podcast, Andrew reveals the step-by-step plan to finally achieve your money goals, covering how to get clarity on your why, set SMART goals, create an actionable plan, keep score with a scorecard, plan your week with time blocking, and automate your finances to make discipline inevitable.
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Transcript 11,342 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Andrew Giancola? Now, if you watch this podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube, you've probably noticed the wood slat walls behind us. We wanted this podcast set to look professional, but also not be a project that was overly complicated. And I found these slat walls on Wayfair, and it completely changed this space. And it's now basically the background that you see in every single podcast or piece of content that we record. And that's one of the things that I love about Wayfair. You can shop thousands of products across different styles and budgets, use customer photos and reviews to see how things actually look in real homes, and find something that fits your space. They also have Wayfair Verified Products that are hand vetted by product specialists using a 10-point quality inspection.
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1:17 Speaker 01 Wayfair, every style, every home.
1:20 Andrew Giancola? When I started the Personal Finance Podcast, I had no idea how big it could become. I just knew I had something I wanted to share, so I started putting it online. And looking back, I definitely wish I would have started a decade earlier. One of the horror parts about building something online, though, is making it look professional. A website used to mean hiring a developer, figuring out design, and potentially spending thousands of dollars. In fact, on my website, I spent tens of thousands of dollars. That's what impressed me when playing around with Hostinger's AI website builder. I told it what kind of website I wanted, and I built the first version in minutes. No coding, no designer or developer needed. And Hostinger doesn't stop at launch.
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2:42 Andrew Giancola? What's up everybody and welcome to the personal finance podcast. I'm your host Andrew, founder of mastermoney.co. And today on the personal finance podcast, we're going to teach you how to achieve all of your money goals in 2026. If you guys have any questions, make sure you join the master money newsletter by going to mastermoney.co/newsletter. And don't forget to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or whatever podcast player you love listening to this podcast on. And if you want to help out the show, consider leaving a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. Now here's a big announcement before we dive into this episode is on January
3:24 Andrew Giancola? 14th, 2026, we are giving a free webinar on how to master your money goals. And so in this episode, I'm going to give you a bunch of valuable information that's going to help you jumpstart and get ready to accomplish every single thing that you want to accomplish in 2026. And then in the master your money goals workshop, I'm going to give you all my goal setting sheets. I'm going to give you my time blocking sheets. I'm going to give you all of the tools that you need in order to make sure that this is the best year that you ever have. If you're the type of person who wants to set goals and you set some goals and you really never accomplish them by the time December rolls around, this is the workshop for you. It is going to give you peace. It is going to give you clarity
4:08 Andrew Giancola? around your money and it's going to give you the exact steps that you need in order to make sure that you accomplish every single thing you want to in life. And this goes for money. This goes for life. This goes for relationships. This goes for family. This goes for fit. All of those things can be accomplished through this exact system and in Master Your Money Goals in that workshop, I'm going to show you exactly what to do step by step. In addition, you're going to be able to ask me questions after about goal setting and some of the things that you need to be doing. So we will be having conversations in that workshop that are going to help you through this. And the best part is this is completely free. I'm giving this workshop away because I want to help as many people as possible learn how to build wealth. My goal is to create a million millionaires. And so this is the starting point
4:49 Andrew Giancola? is learning how to set the proper financial goals. You need to make sure that you are working on your goals every single year and you're working towards something constantly. And so Master Your Money Goals and this workshop is going to help you do that. So again, the link is going to be down below in the show notes. We will put it at the top of the show notes. So it's very easy to find. And what I want you to do is register now because I have a limited amount of seats in that workshop. And so I want to be able to cater to everyone who is on that workshop live and be able to answer all of your questions and give you enough attention in that workshop. So if you want to join that workshop, I will be live. I'll be teaching you through this whole process and answering those questions. So it's completely free. Make sure you join down below because again, spots are limited.
5:32 Andrew Giancola? So every year, you tell yourself, this is the year I'm going to get my financial life together. And every year you do it for a couple of weeks, or maybe even a couple of months, but then you end up quitting. Maybe your goal was to start maxing out your retirement accounts. Maybe your goal was to make sure you had enough money in your emergency fund to cover any unexpected expenses. Maybe your goal was to buy your first rental property. Maybe you wanted to go out and buy a business. Maybe your goal was to finally just get a hold of where your spending is going for once in your life. So you don't have to feel the pain and the stress of your money just going out of your account all the time and you have no idea where it went. All of these are fantastic goals and all of these are things that a lot of you out
6:16 Andrew Giancola? there struggle with, but guess what? Today, I am going to show you a system on exactly how to set, but also achieve your financial goals. We're going to be talking through a number of different things and I'm going to help you reduce your stress around money. I'm going to help you reduce your anxiety around money. I'm going to help you reduce uncertainty around money and we're going to find a way to achieve those financial goals that you have always dreamed of. You have the opportunity and you have the ability to change your family's financial life. No matter where you came from, no matter where you started, maybe your parents were bad with money, maybe you grew up in poverty, maybe you grew up with wealthy parents who really had no idea how to manage the wealth that was handed to them. It doesn't matter where you started.
7:00 Andrew Giancola? What can happen right now is, and it starts with goals, is that you can change your financial life for the better. And what will happen is you can draw a line in the sand today and say, listen, I am going to be the person that changes my family tree. I am going to be the person that in 2026, that is the year I'm going to look back on and I set these financial goals and actually accomplish them. I set these financial goals and for once in my life, I actually achieved them. Now, the only way to do this, to reduce your stress and anxiety around money, to reduce the uncertainty around money, to reduce the sleepless nights that you have when you wake up in the middle of the night in a sweat and say to yourself, man, I've got some bills due and I don't know where the money's going to come from.
7:44 Andrew Giancola? Or you wake up in the middle of the night in a complete sweat saying, man, I've got all these businesses and I don't know how to handle this stress anymore. The way to think about this is we are going to set goals and we are going to achieve those goals. But the only way to achieve a goal is to have a system in place. You see, a lot of people think that achieving goals are habits, like you have the right habits in place and that's how you achieve those goals. No, I want you to remember this right now. Habits are for suckers and systems are for winners. Systems are what help you achieve your financial goals. And so today in this episode, what I'm going to do is I'm going to teach you the system that changes. My life. See, I started out living paycheck to paycheck.
8:26 Andrew Giancola? I started out as the person who could not make ends meet. And instead, I said to myself, one day, when I went to a gas pump and did not have enough money to fill up my tank of gas, I said to myself, this is never going to happen to me again. Guess what? This never happening to me again was my first goal that I ever set, especially when it came to my finances. And you know what happened? That has never happened to me again. And it is one of those things that changed my life forever. I hit rock bottom, and maybe you're hitting rock bottom right now, too. Maybe you've had the toughest year yet. I get it. Guess what? Prices are inflated. Everybody is struggling to make ends meet. Housing prices are at an all time high, but wages are at an all time low in comparison. This is a hard time to manage your finances.
9:11 Andrew Giancola? And so it is very important that you have goals in place and a system in place to help you manage those dollars. Because there's always going to be a reason why it is difficult to manage your finances. But if you're the type of person that is blaming the economy or blaming the industry that you work in, now is the time to change and focus on what you can control. And guess what you can control? Your goals and the things that you were going to do to make them happen. Way too many people out there will comment on our videos, or they'll comment on things that we talk about and say, hey, this can't happen. I don't make enough money. Well, we're going to figure out ways to, if you want to increase your income, you can go out and do that. If you want to max out those retirement accounts, you can go out and do that. If you want to just change your family's financial tree and start to build a financial foundation,
9:56 Andrew Giancola? you can go and do that. Or maybe you want to make a million dollars this year. Well, we can see if that's possible. And it all is found in goal setting. Goals are the parameters. They are the things that we need to be doing every single year if we want to have the life that we want to live. You can live in abundance. You can live in a prosperity, but you have to first start with setting goals and understanding the parameters. See, goal setting is not something where you go out there and people will say, hey, goal setting is an art. It is something that you just got to kind of figure out and you go with the flow. No. This is a systematic thing. You can do and accomplish in our framework is going to change the way you think about this. See, this has come from trial and error. When I started from nothing and all of a sudden in my first
10:41 Andrew Giancola? two years after making $30,000 per year, I had $100,000 net worth in two years at the age of 25. How did I do that? Well, I set up goals and I set up systems and how to accomplish those goals. And I'm going to teach you exactly what I did here because then just a few years later, I became a millionaire. And the way that I did this was setting up the goals properly. And so what we're going to do is talk about this. This is your foundation to accomplishing anything you want in life. And we're going to talk about this today. This is one of those life-changing episodes. And again, if you learn this stuff, I highly, highly, highly recommend that you lock in right now. Because if you learn this stuff, you will be able to do anything you want in life. So if you're ready to take action and you're ready to take action consistently
11:24 Andrew Giancola? and put a system together that can change your life, then let's get into it.
11:31 Andrew Giancola? Step one is we're going to get clear on our goals. We're going to get some clarity surrounding our goals. Now here's the big thing that I want you to figure out is I want you to set aside some time to get very clear on what you want to accomplish this year. In addition, I also want you to think further out. I want you to think, well, what direction am I going to be rowing towards? So where do I want to be in two years, in three years, in five years, and in 10 years? Because we want to think about these big audacious goals that we have. And maybe they feel almost too big right now. Maybe those big goals that are 10 to 20 years down the line feel like they are just way too far out of reach. You could be $200,000 into debt and you're like, I want to retire in 20 years. I don't want to keep doing this job forever.
12:14 Andrew Giancola? How am I ever going to do that when I'm already having a negative net worth? We're going to do it and we're going to find action items to help us get to that big, big goal. But we can't do it if we don't have a plan in place. If you're just trying to flow through life and think you're going to accomplish stuff, you're absolutely not going to accomplish anything of substance. We need to make sure that we are setting up clarity and figuring out exactly what we want to do. So I want you to grab a notebook. I want you to grab your computer. We're going to ask ourselves a couple of different questions. Now pause. One thing that you need to do is if you are managing money with a partner or a spouse, you guys need to also have a conversation about this. You need to talk about your dreams and talk about your goals, your dream life. What do you want to do within
12:58 Andrew Giancola? this life? And so we're going to talk about these questions here. I want you to talk about this together, though, if you are in a relationship. Number one is what is my why? Why are you even doing this? Why are you setting up these money goals? And I want you to write this down. This can be a paragraph. This can be a sentence. It doesn't matter what it is, but you need to know why you are doing this. If you don't have a reason why you're setting up these goals, then you're never going to stick to it whatsoever. So for me, my why is to have freedom and flexibility to do whatever I want, when I want, with whom I want. That is my number one why and the thing that I want to make sure that I am doing. And so flexibility and freedom is everything to me. And having the ability to go to my kid's soccer practice whenever, or to spend time with
13:40 Andrew Giancola? my wife whenever I want to. If one of my kids need to be homesick, I can be there for them. That is what I want in life. That is the flexibility I want in life. In addition, I want to make sure I have enough money on hand to be able to do whatever I want, using money as a tool to get what I want out of life. And so that is part of my big why, that is part of my North Star. What is your why? What is your North Star? Is it to make sure you have those same types of freedoms? Is it so that you can go on vacation as much as you possibly can? Is it so you can go out and spend more time on your hobbies? What is your why? Why are you actually doing this? Why are you setting up these financial goals? Goals are meant to have specific intentions. You need to say what those intentions are. Now, I want you to write this on a piece of paper.
14:24 Andrew Giancola? What is your big intentions? You need to be very specific on this. If it needs to be a whole page, I don't care. It needs to be specific on what you are trying to do and what your why is. Now, if you're planning this with someone else, you need to merge your two whys together. Guess what? In a marriage or in your relationship, a lot of times, you have to merge the two together. You may have differences of opinion in what your why is, but you got to figure out a way to compromise and merge those two together. We have an Coming up on managing money with couples. So if you're interested in that, make sure you're subscribed to this podcast because that is going to be something where we're going to talk a lot about that over the course of the next year. And so if you are thinking about this, making sure you have these conversations is really, really important.
15:05 Andrew Giancola? Now, C, the third question I want you to make sure that you put on this sheet is how do you define success? What does success look like to you when it comes to accomplishing your goals? Because if you just set up a goal, but you don't define success, how do you actually figure out if you've accomplished that goal or did it correctly? So let's say, for example, you want to go out there and you want to make sure that you feel comfortable with money. What does that mean? What does that look like? How much money do you need to have on hand? How much do you need to have in place? And you may not know the exact numbers and that's okay, because we can set up goals based on what those numbers need to be. But you need to understand what defines success for you. And then here's the big one is D, what are your five-year, three-year and one-year goals?
15:49 Andrew Giancola? So maybe in five years, you're saying to yourself, I want to be able to buy my first house in five years. Maybe your three-year goal is I want to make sure I'm consistently maxing out my retirement accounts. And maybe your one-year goal is making progress towards some of those things. But let's map out some of those goals, your five-year, your three-year and your one-year goals. Because then what we do is we begin to work backwards towards those goals in some of our next steps. But first, we need to have the vision in place and understand why we're doing what we're doing, who we're doing it with, and in what direction are we going to be rowing? Because we need to know what the ultimate goal is. And for a lot of you, it's financial freedom. I talked to a lot of you in Master Money Academy. Most of you want financial freedom. You want more time and energy spent doing the things that you love.
16:32 Andrew Giancola? And that's what we are going to be accomplishing as we go through this. All right, now let's jump into number two.
16:39 Andrew Giancola? All right, number two is you need to set specific goals. Now, your goals need to be very specific, because if they're not specific, then we have no idea what success is. And so we need to make sure that we are very, very specific when we're thinking about this. And so the way that we do this is we set up SMART goals. And so a lot of you out there may have heard of SMART goals. They even teach it in like high school and elementary schools and college. And so this is something that is a very good system. But the way that we look at SMART goals is a little bit different than everybody else. And so if you've never heard of SMART goals, it is an acronym. It stands for specific. Measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. And so those are the different areas that we're going to talk about here. So first, let's talk about specific.
17:24 Andrew Giancola? So you need to be specific in every single way. When you are looking at a goal, you need to state exactly what you need to do to achieve those goals, and what actually is success. And so a lot of times, for most people, we need to make sure that we map out exactly what we want to do when it comes to that goal. So say, for example, you wanted to make sure that you saved up $1,000 in the first month. Okay, so you're going to write down, I need to save $1,000 in the first month. And now what are you going to do to get there? How are you going to get that first $1,000? Because if you don't make an extra $1,000 per month, then you are having a stretch goal in place currently. And so when we think about this, we need to make sure, okay, well, I'm going to sell some of these items so that I can go and ensure that I can save up $1,000 in this first month. Or I'm going to go out and drive for Uber.
18:09 Andrew Giancola? I'm going to get a side hustle. Or I'm going to start working on my side business so I can make more money. What are the things that you're going to do in order to have that additional $1,000? M is measurable. So to make this measurable, we need to think about, how do we measure success? How do we measure success when it comes to this specific goal? So when I first started, when I was living paycheck to paycheck, I wanted to make sure I had a one-month cushion within my budget. That's all I wanted was a very simple goal to get a one-month cushion so I could begin to get ahead. And I wanted to get it done in three months. And so I set up a very specific plan to make sure that I could save up enough money in order to get to that point in time where it is in three months. So it's measurable, because if I don't accomplish it in three months, that means I failed.
18:54 Andrew Giancola? And so I put these measurements into place in order to ensure that I'm actually going to achieve that goal. Now, A is achievable. When it comes to achievable goals, what too many rookies do is they go out and try to make a stretch goal that is way too big for their britches. And so instead, they'll go out and they'll say, hey, I want to save a million dollars this year. Well, sure, that's fantastic. What a wonderful goal to save a million dollars this year. But if you make $50,000 per year, that is a really, really difficult goal to achieve. And so instead, you say to yourself, well, hey, I want to make $75,000 this year. You're increasing it to a more achievable goal because if these goals aren't achievable, you're going to get halfway through, you're going to get a quarter of the way through, and you're going to end up quitting. You've got to make them achievable. And what I say to most people is if you really want to challenge yourself,
19:38 Andrew Giancola? think about your goal, and if you think you can actually accomplish it, like you're very confident you can accomplish this goal, then stretch it by 10%. Just stretch it slightly so that it becomes a little bit more difficult for you to actually achieve, and then you have to push to make sure you achieve that goal. Now, if you're new to goal setting and you're someone who quits your goals all the time, you don't need to do the stretch portion just yet. In fact, I would highly encourage you to make your goals just slightly easier than even what normally you would do. But if you're the type of person who really knows that you can accomplish this goal, stretching it slightly is going to help you just get way past that finish line. Now, R is relevant. So, relevant means that this goal is achievable, but it also fits in with the broader scope of things of exactly what you want to accomplish.
20:21 Andrew Giancola? If your goal is to become financially independent, then the last thing that you need to be doing is focusing your time and energy on things that do not make you financially independent. It needs to fit your larger vision or plan. It needs to fit exactly what you are trying to do. So, if your goal, for example, is to make sure that you're maxing out your retirement accounts, but instead you're prioritizing your kid's 529 plan, that is the wrong way to think about this. You need to make sure that these goals are relevant to exactly what you're trying to do. A 529 plan does not make you financially independent. Instead, it helps your kids pay for college. But what happens here? We need to make sure that we prioritize our retirement first before we pay for our kids' college.
21:02 Andrew Giancola? And so, this is where this comes into play, is making sure that we are prioritizing the right things. And then T is time bound. So, time bound is one of the most important metrics that we talk about a lot of times, and we're going to go through this a lot in the Master Your Money Goals webinar. Well, what we're going to be talking about is with this time bound, we actually are going to set goals in 12-week increments. That's the way we do this. There's this book called The 12-Week Year. That is a fantastic read if anybody has ever seen it. And in the 12-week year, what we do is instead of setting goals for the entire year and trying to accomplish it and trying to stay motivated throughout the entire year, we shorten those timelines. So we put them into quarters so that you can look at this and every 12 weeks, you set up a brand-new set of goals. And what's going to happen here is instead of trying to
21:46 Andrew Giancola? stretch it throughout the year, you're going to be much more likely to A, accomplish those goals, B, accomplish a lot more than you would if it was stretched throughout the entire year, C, you can make adjustments based on this, and D, you're also going to be able to really see your progress throughout this timeframe. And so I'm going to give you the worksheets on how to set up these 12-week goals. And this is going to be a really, really powerful thing if you've never done this before. And we go through this and look at this, and you'll see, every week matters. And so it'll make you take action, it'll keep you disciplined, it'll keep you on top of your goals. So if you have to accomplish that in 12 weeks, it's going to make a big, big difference overall.
22:23 Andrew Giancola? All right. So step three is now we have our why. We have our vision of exactly what we're going to be doing. And we've set up our SMART goals. We've listed out some of our goals. Now we're going to create an action plan. And you may be saying to yourself, well, how many goals should I be working on at a time? Just a few, a handful of goals is absolutely fantastic. And you can have them in specific areas. So let's say you want a fitness goal, you want a financial goal, you want a relationship goal. That is absolutely fantastic. You can have a couple of different goals going all at once. There's nothing wrong with that whatsoever. In fact, I would highly recommend that for a number of different things. Typically, I will have a few fitness goals, some financial goals, and some relationship goals that I want to make sure that I accomplish. So as you start to think about this, now we need to develop a plan. We need
23:08 Andrew Giancola? to put a plan in place that we can actually accomplish those goals. Because how many times have you written down a goal, or you've thought about a goal that you want to accomplish, and you never actually put a plan into place? Well, a goal without a plan is just a wish. You're just wishing it's going to happen. You're just hoping it's going to happen. And hope is the wrong thing to ever have when it comes to goal setting. Instead, we want to be disciplined and have a system in place that allows us to actually achieve our financial goals, or any other goal that you want to achieve in life. And so what we're We're going to do is we're going to break these goals into small actionable steps. Don't let the size of the goal intimidate you. Instead, what I want you to do is we're going to think about this in small actions that we can take every single year. So let's say, for example, that you want to read a book every single week.
23:53 Andrew Giancola? And every single week this year in 2026, you want to read one book. That's 52 books in a given year. That is an incredible goal, but when you say I'm going to read 52 books this year, that sounds like it is a daunting task. But let me show you when you break this down, how really it's not a daunting task at all. You start with the big goal, which is 52 books per year. Then we break it down by month. Well, I need to read four to five books every single month, depending on how many weeks are in that given month. Then you break it down by weeks. I need to read one book every single week. And then you break it down by days. And so we think about this and say, well, how many pages will you read today? We're going to take the book that you're currently reading. You're going to look at the number of pages on that book and divide it by seven. Why? There are seven days in a given week. And all of a sudden, that's how many pages you're going to read today.
24:38 Andrew Giancola? So if you have a 300 page book divided by seven, that's 43 pages per day. If you do those action steps by the end of the week, you finish your first book and you are week one accomplishing your goal. Here's the cool thing. Success is literally that simple if you just stick to your plan. If you just set up the steps that you needed to do every single day and take those daily actions, you've been absolutely accomplished your goal. If you know you want to take a day off every single week from reading and you know, you know, Sundays, I'm watching football or Sundays, I'm going to brunch with my friends or Sundays, I usually am busy with kid stuff. And I'm not going to read that day, then guess what? Just divide it by six, but know what circumstances happened in your life and be realistic about this. Cause if you're trying to stretch your discipline, it's not going to happen.
25:22 Andrew Giancola? You got to make sure that you are instead realistic about what you were trying to do. Now let's think about it the same way as saving money. Let's say again that you want to save $3,000 over the course of the next three months. Well, if that's the case, break it down by month. Well, I need to save $1,000 every single month. Break it down by week. Well, I need to save $250 every single week, then break it down by day. And once you start to do these micro chunks, it's going to help you dramatically realize. That you can accomplish these goals and you can absolutely do this. Now, if that daily goal or that weekly goal or that monthly goal is too much of a stretch, where you don't have enough cash on hand to be able to save there, then you need to do two things. One, you need to decide, well, how am I going to make it up? How am I going to make up the difference if I really want to accomplish this goal? Or two, you need to change that goal and adjust it to a more realistic number.
26:08 Andrew Giancola? And that is the way that we need to think about this and how we can accomplish these goals. Now, a lot of times I will stretch my goals when it comes to financial things, and I will find a way to accomplish it in between. And I do this for business too. So the same thing goes for business. I will say to myself, well, if you want to build a business, I just helped somebody do this the other day. They have a business where they have specific clients come in, an aesthetics business, where they have clients come in, and they needed to make X amount of dollars every single month. And in fact, to pay all their bills, all they needed to do was make a thousand dollars every single month to pay all their business bills, their overhead, their rental space, all that kind of stuff. Then they wanted to make an additional three to $4,000 so they could live their lifestyle. Well, in order to do this, we can figure out how many clients you need in order to break this down.
26:52 Andrew Giancola? And so we went backwards and figured out, okay, well, every single client usually spends about a hundred dollars every single month. Well, all we need is to try to attract at least 40 clients per month, and she's working three days a week, so three and a half clients per day. And so she's working three days a week. And so we broke it down by day on how many clients she needs per day. And then we built a marketing plan around that. And so when you break it up into these daily actionable chunks, it makes accomplishing your goals so much easier. So here's the big lesson I want you to understand from this step is don't leave your future to chance. Success isn't something you stumble into. Success is something you design, and you can design your own success, whether it's financial, health, business, it doesn't matter what it is. You can design your own success by just working backwards.
27:38 Andrew Giancola? It just takes the proper planning. And people who plan in this way are the people who are most successful. The millionaires, you know, are the ones who are planning through these processes throughout the week, and they have these systems in place. Now, I'm going to show you, it doesn't take that long to do all of this. When you set all this up, you know what you want to accomplish this year. You know the goals that you have. Maybe it's to max out your Roth IRA. Maybe it's to max out your 401k. Maybe it's to finally fund that emergency fund. Doesn't matter what that goal is. We just need to work on this and work backwards towards this. So your discipline is the bridge between your goals and accomplishments. And so when you think about this, I want you to think about, well, how do I stay disciplined? I just make sure I have the daily actions that I know I need to do every single day. And if I do those things, I'm going to accomplish my goal.
28:20 Andrew Giancola? So that's number three is making sure that we break them down into small chunks. Number four is we're going to learn how to keep score next.
28:29 Andrew Giancola? It's kind of amazing how much can change in just a single year. Every summer, the kids are a little bigger, a little more independent, and life looks a little different than it did the year before. And it reminds me that while we can't predict the future, we can prepare for it. That's one of the reasons I like PolicyGenius. See, PolicyGenius isn't an insurance company. They're an online marketplace that lets you compare life insurance quotes from some of America's top insurers, side by side, for free. And their licensed team helps you compare coverage, prices, and terms, answers your questions, and even handles the paperwork so you can get the right policy without the hassle. For me, having life insurance isn't about expecting something to happen.
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33:32 Andrew Giancola? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. So what a lot of people will ask is, now, how do I measure progress? And progress measurement is one of the most important things when it comes to goal setting. And we have a very specific system that I'm going to teach you here on how to measure your progress. And you absolutely have to measure your progress to figure out exactly where you stand. Imagine watching a football game, for example, and they didn't keep score. They just kept playing back and forth, but they were not keeping score. And every time someone scores, you didn't know if they're winning or losing. The same goes for your goals. If you don't keep track or you don't keep score, you're going to have no idea where you stand. And so it's very important to have a system in place to make sure we are tracking and keeping score. Now, keeping score helps keep you aware and it allows you to stay on top of those goals.
34:17 Andrew Giancola? If you're aware that you're behind on a specific goal. Let's say, for example, you're looking to increase your income and you're in sales. And you're supposed to make 60 phone calls every single day and you know that if you make 60 quality phone calls every single day, then you're going to be able to make $200,000 per year. And so you decide, okay, I'm going to make those 60 phone calls every single day. And if you don't track this, if you don't understand how many phone calls you actually made, you'll have no idea where you stand. Where if you're starting to fall behind on your goal, you'll never be able to go and look back and see, oh, wow, I didn't make enough phone calls over the course of the last two weeks. That's why I'm falling behind. So you need to make sure that you have a scoreboard and a way to track your progress towards those goals.
34:59 Andrew Giancola? And by the way, in Master Your Money Goals, in the workshop, the free workshop on the 14th, I'm going to show you the exact scoreboard that I use and I'm going to give it to you for free in that workshop. So if you're interested in that, make sure you check that out. Now, creating a scorecard is not a nice to have thing. It is a must have if you want to be serious about accomplishing your goals. Now, my scorecard specifically isn't like a dusty document that I look at once a year. I'm looking at this every single week and sometimes I'm looking at it multiple times a week. And that's the key. Tracking your goals isn't a one time event. What a lot of people do is they write down their goals, they put it in their notes app, they put it on a document. And all of a sudden, they don't look at it for the rest of the year. Maybe they look at it a couple of times in January and then all of a sudden, December rolls around and they can't even find that document and they look at it and the last date it was opened was January 17th, 2025.
35:44 Andrew Giancola? That, my friends, is a problem. We need to make sure that instead we are accomplishing these goals and we are looking at our scorecard over and over and over again. Number one is the way you build your own scorecard. And again, I'm going to give you my exact one in the Master Your Money Goals workshop, but it is define your metrics, meaning what are you going to track? So for financial goals, it may be your savings rate. It may be your investment contributions. It may be your debt pay down and how much you're putting towards debt. Or it may be some of your spending categories, but what exactly are you going to track? For example, in our sales example that I just gave, that person would be tracking how many phone calls they make. If you're trying to get in shape, you're tracking how many workouts you have made. If you're trying to get in shape and you want to do seven workouts per week, you're tracking your workouts.
36:28 Andrew Giancola? Number two is you need to set your check-in intervals. So no matter what, you need to check in on the scorecard at a specific interval. And now, I don't really care the frequency of this, but it needs to be at least a monthly frequency. Now, for me, I'm going to tell you exactly what I do. So I look at my scorecard on Sundays, and every Sunday, I go back and I do my weekly review. And I'm going to go through my weekly planning review in Master Your Money Goals in more detail, but I'll go through and look at my scorecard in addition to looking at my time blocking week, and I'll look at my goals. And I'll say, listen, I'm behind on this specific goal. I need to make sure I time block more time in order to achieve that goal. And then I'll put it into my calendar. So it actually dictates what my actions are going to be throughout the week.
37:13 Andrew Giancola? And this is how you actually accomplish goals, is you let your goals and your scorecard help you figure out what actions you need to be taking throughout the week. And then if you're way ahead, then maybe you can reduce some of the time spent on some of those goals. But you have to make sure that you are prioritizing reviewing this at some sort of cadence, whether it's monthly, whether it's weekly, whether it's bi-weekly. But if you let it go beyond monthly, then you're really not serious about your goals. I know a lot of people who are very good at setting and achieving goals who look at this daily, and they'll look at it every single day and make sure that they are moving towards their goals. Weekly is perfect for me, is what I've found, and I do it every single Sunday during my Sunday review. And then the third thing I would highly recommend is to make it visual. So for me, I make it visual on a spreadsheet where we look at this and we have it in a
37:58 Andrew Giancola? table, and you can see which goals you're accomplishing, and you can check off the box that you accomplished it that month, and we do it throughout the entire 12 weeks of goal setting. Maybe you have an app that you use or a journal that you use, but make it something that you can see. Make the numbers something that show that you're making progress in one specific direction. Because visualization and being able to see exactly the progress you're making is going to keep you motivated and disciplined moving forward. Find ways to visualize your goals. So this is why a lot of charities or a lot of other companies, when they are setting up a specific financial goal, they'll have that red thermometer that they're starting to color in. This is a visual representation of the progress towards that goal. And this really has worked for decades and decades and decades.
38:41 Andrew Giancola? And so I want you to find what's your red thermometer? What is your way that you are going to see what the progress is towards actually accomplishing your goal? Now, when you review this scorecard, I want you to turn tracking into a habit. This is a habit that you just do at a specific frequency every single week. And you're going to say, am I ahead or behind? Is the first question you're going to ask yourself? Well, if you are, then what's working and what needs adjusting? Just because you're not accomplishing your goals perfectly doesn't mean you can't accomplish that goal. Sometimes we just may need to make tweaks and adjustments. And reviewing regularly allows us to make those tweaks without having to panic and freak out every single time. So I am a big proponent of just slow movement when it comes to your finances. You've heard me talk about this when reducing your spending. Just reduce one category slowly over time.
39:25 Andrew Giancola? You've heard me talk about this when it comes to increasing your investing. Just increase it 1% every single month until it feels painful. You've heard me talk about this even when I'm thinking about retirement planning, where you're adjusting your retirement plan slightly every single year instead of every decade where you're making these drastic changes. I am all about turning up and boiling that frog slowly instead of doing it all at once. Why? Because it's less painful and it's a lot easier to deal with your situation. The same thing goes for your goals. If you need to adjust your goals, you need to just slowly do it. And so more frequent review is really, really helpful for me. Now, if you're the type of person that knows, I'm not going to look at this every week because you know your own psychology, you know your own habits, you know how you work. If you're the person that says, I'm just not going to review this every week.
40:11 Andrew Giancola? I know I'm not. It's just not going to happen, Andrew. Don't even ask me to do it every single week. I'll do it once a month if I have to, but I'm not going to do it every week. That's fine. But you've got to make sure that you have a system in place to review and ask yourselves those questions. The more you review it, honestly, the better off you're going to be. And so for some people, I know they even will print off their scorecard. They'll keep it on their desk. They'll put it on their mirror at home so they can think about it pretty frequently. Here's the thing is you can't win the game if you don't know the score. And this is the scorecard is going to help you progress throughout your entire life. And so having that scorecard in place is very, very important.
40:47 Andrew Giancola? Now, step five is, and I alluded to this earlier, but it is weekly planning. And so what I do is I plan out my week on Sundays. And again, I'm recording this episode on a Monday right now. I planned out my entire week yesterday. So I went on my computer. I went through my scorecard. I looked at the things that I needed to accomplish and some of the big goals that I had. And then I went into Google Calendar and I went into my time blocking sequence and I started to time block out my entire week. And so I thought about my goals. I went through there and I went to make sure that I had the right things in place. Success begins with a plan. And the best time, in my opinion, to plan is before the week begins. So I call it my Sunday ritual. I do it on Sunday because I can either, you know, kind of be flexible, you know, do it in the mornings, or if I want to do it in the evening and I didn't have enough time early
41:32 Andrew Giancola? in the day, I can do it in the evening as well. But this sets the tone for the week and this sets the tone for exactly where you stand. Honestly, not having a plan in place for me, not having my time blocked out every single week is exhausting because then I'm just running around like a chicken with my head cut off and not able to accomplish anything. But instead, if you have a plan in place, you know what you're going to be doing in every hour, every minute of every single day. All of the sudden, you actually feel energized. I feel so much better knowing that I have my time blocked out and I know what's next. So if you've ever suffered from just running around all over the place, always feeling stressed about your time, I highly recommend that you follow this ritual and time block. Again, we'll talk even more about the Sunday ritual in the Master Your Money Goals webinar,
42:15 Andrew Giancola? but I would highly recommend that you try this time blocking technique because it's very, very important to do this. So here's the importance of making sure that you do this right. Okay. It's number one is setting aside the time to plan. So I chose Sunday. If you think you can plan on Mondays or Saturdays, or you like Fridays, then plan it any which way you think is going to work for you. I just know Sundays, I'm going to have a little more time, most likely than most other days. My businesses don't have people calling me all the time. And so there's just a lot less going on on a Sunday than would be on other days. And so I know I can carve out the 15 minutes I need in order to get my planning done. It's also at the beginning of the week, right before the week hits the ground running on Monday. And so that when I walk in on Monday, I know exactly what I'm going to be doing.
42:59 Andrew Giancola? And I can really, really hit the ground running. So it's very important that you make sure you think about this. In fact, I'll tell you, one of my big productivity goals for this year is to never miss a time blocking day. Last year I had some really busy days where I would try to time block out the entire week. And there'd be some holes where I would leave some openings. And when I had those openings within my calendar, guess what happened? Every single time they got wasted on things that were not my priority. So instead, I want to make sure I never have any holes throughout the week and I time block everything. So that is going to be a big key for me in 2026. And I highly recommend that every single person think about it that way. I want 365 days of full on time blocking.
43:40 Andrew Giancola? Two is when you are going through your ritual, your weekly ritual, I call it my Sunday ritual. But then you want to make sure that you are reviewing your goals. So going through your goals, making sure you're progressing, making sure you're actually accomplishing those goals. And you're moving towards the actual thing that you want to be doing. Number three is once you're reviewing your goals, then you can time block those priorities. So then you can go in there, you can choose your time block and think about this. So let's say, for example, you want to ensure that your most important tasks are getting done first. And so you could think, okay, Monday morning, you're focused on strategic planning. And that's what you want to do. Or Tuesday afternoon, you want to think about a deep work on a key project, then you can put that in there. Thursday evening, you want to make sure you have family time. Maybe you have family movie night or whatever else. And so you want to make sure you're prioritizing that kind of stuff.
44:23 Andrew Giancola? And by planning this way, it makes sure that all your big priorities get put into your calendar first. And then you can fill all of the rest in. This also helps when people say, hey, you're free for a quick 15 minute meeting? You know what? Look at your calendar. No, I'm not free for that quick 15 minute meeting. If you want to get on my calendar, here are some of the open areas. And you can even put on your calendar, this is something I have learned over time, is you can put a slot meetings. And so a lot of times for me specifically, when it comes to meetings, I will work backwards. So I will do the latest time of the day is when my first meeting will begin. So if I want to leave the office at 5:00 PM, then 4:30 is my first meeting. That's when I will take my first meeting for that specific day. So I can get all the main other stuff done.
45:05 Andrew Giancola? And so if you work backwards on your calendar from things that are wasteful like meetings, then you can ensure that you can really nail this. Now, number four is when I plan out my week, I plan for flexibility. So before I was just leaving it as an open time block. Instead, what we're going to do is we're going to plan for this flexibility and build it in. So I'm going to leave some flexibility within my time blocks. Maybe they're 15 minute increments or spots where we can have these breaks that allow us, if we get interrupted, which happens a lot, but if we get interrupted, then we can make sure that we still have ample time to accomplish everything we want to accomplish in that given day. And then number five is one big thing is I would highly encourage you to include personal development. Reading books, listen to podcasts like this, or taking courses,
45:48 Andrew Giancola? learning more about skills and specific things that you want to do out there. That is going to be a great place. Just make sure you time block a little bit of that in, in addition to obviously fitness and health stuff, so that you don't just spiral out of control and don't prioritize those things. So if you don't know what frequency you should do, I highly recommend and challenge you to set aside some time to plan every Sunday. Just do exactly what I do and see if your life doesn't improve over that timeframe. It doesn't take a long time. Usually it takes about 15 minutes. In some weeks, it's taken even less than that because I know exactly what I want to be doing. But you can plan out your entire week and think about this in a much better way. Now, in the workshop, I'm going to give you the scorecard, but I'm also going to give you my planning ritual time blocking spreadsheet. This is what I use a lot of times when I want some clarity.
46:33 Andrew Giancola? When I want to reevaluate my weeks and say, hey, these weeks are spiraling out of control. I feel like I'm not being as productive as I should be. Then I use this time blocking spreadsheet to re-center my entire structure so that I know exactly where I need to be. And so it'll have the days of the week and the ways that you can time block and think about this. And I separate all the tasks by professional, business, and personal so that I know exactly what those tasks are and where they need to land. So it helps me plan this out, plan my perfect day that I call it. And so usually I will look at this and plan out my perfect days so that I can re-center and get back on track to exactly where I need to go. I do this pretty frequently and so I use it a lot. And it is one of those things that really, really is helpful. And we'll teach you how to use that in the workshop as well.
47:19 Andrew Giancola? Now, one big question people get is, you know, what happens if I start to fail? What if my goals start to fall behind? Or what if they lag behind? And what I want you to understand is I don't want you to feel guilt about this. I don't want you to feel worried about this. Instead, what we need to do is just set some parameters in place. Number one is never miss twice. So if you want to work out three days a week and you miss a day, just make sure you don't miss the second day in that week. Or if you want to make sure that you're flossing every single day and you miss a day, just make sure you don't miss two days in a row. James Clear talks about this a lot in A Topic Habits, where he basically says, don't break the chain. And if you do break the chain, just don't miss two days in a row. That is going to be the best overall golden rule when it comes to habits and making sure you stick to them.
48:00 Andrew Giancola? And then secondly, is I want you to think in a mindset of resetting, not restarting. Too many people just restart their life over and over and over again. For some of us, I think it gives us some dopamine because we're getting a fresh start over and over again. But instead, let's just make sure we hit the reset button and not the restart button. Because you're starting all over again on that specific goal. That means all the progress you made up to that specific point does not matter. Instead, we want to roll with the punches. We're never going to have a perfect goal. We're never going to have a perfect month. But instead, we just need to roll with the punches and take them as they come. Adjust those goals every single week if you need to. That's why we have the scorecard, because you can tweak and adjust your goal if you need to, without having to make some drastic change when you get to the end of the quarter. This is something that helps a lot of people.
48:44 Andrew Giancola? Number two is when it comes to your financial goals, if you actually want to accomplish them, automation is the huge key. And we have episodes talking about automation, making sure you're automating your savings, your investments, your bills, and reducing that decision fatigue when it comes to finances. And so I highly encourage you to automate your finances if you have not already, because this is the thing that is going to help reduce some of that fatigue when it comes to making sure you hit those goals. And this ties into perfectly with consistency and weekly planning. It's just looking at those automations and making sure they're running smoothly. You want to spend less time on your money this year? That might be your goal? Then automating your money is going to be really, really powerful. We also have a free automation checklist. If you want to check that out, we'll put it in the show notes down below that you can grab so you can learn.
49:28 Andrew Giancola? Learn how to automate your money step by step. So here's what I want you to do and what I want you to take away from this. Number one is I want you to reserve your spot in the master your money goals workshop. That's number one. Number two is I want you to schedule a time for a 30 minute clarity session where you're going to figure out what goals do I want to accomplish this year? A lot of things that I like to do is I like to take my wife out to lunch and we go and talk through our goals every year. Number three is write down one to three goals and set up these goals that you want to accomplish for the first quarter of this year. Four is I want you to set up one automation. Automate your finances in one specific way. And then five, plan the upcoming week. Those are the five action items that I want you to take to make sure that you're actually going to take steps towards accomplishing these goals.
50:12 Andrew Giancola? I am really, really excited for each and every single one of you for 2026. This is going to be your best year yet. And so we are going to show you exactly how to do this step by step. And so we've shown you exactly how to do this step by step with this podcast episode. And if you want to dive deeper, again, reserve your spot in the master your money goals webinar. Thank you guys so much for being here. I truly appreciate each and every single one of you and we will see you on the next episode.
Previous 26 Things to Do with Your Money In 2026! Next The EXACT Money Plan for Your 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s (Step-by-Step Blueprint) Page updated October 31, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated