Transcript

How to Set Financial Goals and Actually Achieve Them (2026)

From BiggerPockets Money · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 34 min · 7,307 words · 69 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "How to Set Financial Goals and Actually Achieve Them (2026)", an episode of BiggerPockets Money published December 23, 2025 (34 min, about 7,307 words). It mentions 9 people, works and ideas, including Bigger Pockets Money, Bigger Pockets Money 31-Day Challenge, Scott Trench, Frank Vasquez, Darren Hardy.

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 5:00: Bigger Pockets Money, Mindy Jensen, Scott Trench
  2. – 10:00: Frank Vasquez
  3. – 15:00: Adam August, Darren Hardy, Living Your Best Year Ever
  4. – 20:00: Bigger Pockets Money, League of Legends
  5. – 25:00: Frank Vasquez
  6. – 30:00: Bigger Pockets Money
  7. – 33:42: Darren Hardy, Living Your Best Year Ever, Scott Trench

Notable quotes from "How to Set Financial Goals and Actually Achieve Them (2026)"

  • Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen and with me as always is my loves to set goals co-host Scott Trench.
    about Bigger Pockets Money · at
  • Far it is on time and on budget. So fingers crossed that continues. In July, Frank Vasquez came on the show and walked me through creating a portfolio, a risk parody portfolio…
    about Frank Vasquez · at
  • Me Adam is a big goal setter and gave me this journal from the success guru named Darren Hardy called living your best year ever when I was right when I was graduating college…
    about Darren Hardy · at
  • Go out to the link. I've actually never gone to a game at the link. I am a League of Legends player. I want to get to the next rank in that game. I won't tell everyone what…
    about League of Legends · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

  • Scott Trench — Person · 2 mentions · first at
    Bigger Pockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen and with me as always is my loves to set goals co-host Scott Trench.
  • Frank Vasquez — Person · 2 mentions · first at
  • Darren Hardy — Person · 2 mentions · first at
  • Mindy Jensen — Person · 1 mention · first at
    Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen and with me as always is my loves to set goals co-host Scott Trench.
  • Adam August — Person · 1 mention · first at
    And so I've done this since the moment I graduated college heavily influenced by one of my neighbors shout out to Adam August thank you for all you've done for me Adam is a big…

Books & papers

  • Living Your Best Year Ever — Book · 2 mentions · first at
    Me Adam is a big goal setter and gave me this journal from the success guru named Darren Hardy called living your best year ever when I was right when I was graduating college…

Companies & orgs

Concepts & topics

Full transcript with timestamps

New Year's means new goals and today we are doing ours live. Scott and I are looking back on what we've accomplished this year and we will walk through our goal setting process for 2026 across personal life, professional growth, and financial targets. Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen and with me as always is my loves to set goals co-host Scott Trench.

Thanks Mindy. Great to be here with my resolute co-host Mindy Jensen. Like Mindy said, I think setting goals is hugely important. I think that the end of the year is a great time to look at all this progress and look towards next year. You know, I I'm so into goal setting that I can't help myself. I actually probably spend way too much time setting and revising and and those types of things with goals um on there. Consistency and sticking with it every single day is definitely my bigger challenge than having clear goals. I love it. I can't get enough of it and I'm excited to talk about it today.

Well, let's jump into it, Scott. Let's recap 2025. What did you accomplish personally, professionally, and financially?

On the personal side, we welcomed our newest family member this year. That was not really a accomplishment of mine, but rather of my wife's. Uh, thank you, Virginia. Great job. Uh, on there. Thank you for all the sacrifice that goes into everything around there from the pregnancy to deliver. I mean, it's just it's just crazy uh in there. But that's been wonderful to welcome Taylor into the the trench household and see her kind of develop and grow and she finally moved into her sister's room this week actually and that's gone pretty smoothly. So that's been really fun just watching the family grow. On the personal front I'll also say uh as CEO I was definitely completely obsessed with my work. a lot of the things that you find with like very, you know, career oriented people and the the challenges that that provides in their life, those were definitely happening to me in a lot of different areas. And I was able to

unwind um a lot of those things and really kind of reset into a much better place where I'm much much healthier in my personal life, my family life, all those kinds of things. All that has just completely done a 180 since this time last year when uh things are really challenging for me, frankly, uh in a lot of ways. On the professional front, this has been just one of the most fun years professionally I've ever had. It's so fun to do this show and to actually have the time to kind of think about, hey, what ought we to talk about on the show?

For 8 years we were doing this. I mean, how many times did I show up and I would just arrive like after 3 hours of straight meetings, you know, and then we'd go right into a recording and I kind of have to catch up while we're doing that. And it's so refreshing to be able to do it in a different way right now and actually kind of pour my heart and soul alongside your efforts now into the great content we do here at Bigger Pockets Money on a more part-time to full-timeish. Sometimes it's can stretch into full-time but rarely here at Bigger Pockets Money on there. So that's been awesome just kind of do that. Been working on building the skill set of software development which was never something I could personally do or even really talk through at all. I was totally inept at that this time last year and that's been really fun. And then on the financial side, I would say the biggest win has been my mindset

shift from accumulation to preservation. I don't think I'm in deumulation mode right now, but I'm in I don't have to play this aggressive built ramp up my wealth creation game long term. I can I can play a much more defensive game and live off the the cash flows in my portfolio. And that's been a big transition for me. So, those are my wins. How about you, Mindy?

Well, personally, your youngest daughter was born this year. My oldest daughter went off to college this year. And that was quite a big change for our household. We went from four people in the house to three people in the house. She has settled into college out in California and is really loving where she's at. I have been on a weight loss journey. When you're over 50, losing weight can be really difficult. I have lost 30 lbs so far this year with another 20 to go. So that'll be, you know, next year's goal, too. Professionally, I am really, really, really loving the continued path at Bigger Pockets Money. We're making great content, Scott. We have more time now that you have stepped away as CEO. We have more time to collaborate on ideas and collaborate on shows ahead of time.

You have always been really awesome at just, and I say this with the most love in my heart, showing up to talk instead of putting more of the planning proc being part of the planning process. And now I think we're just even better now that we have your thoughts in the planning process as well. So that's the professional front. Financially, it's been a uh pretty good year, Scott. We have had some great investments that went really, really well. Carl and I were able to get into a private equity situation that just doubled its valuation. So, our financial position is really becoming a game now. Now, it's it's more of, you know, uh we've got the the baseline financial independence done. We've got, you know, fatfire done and now it's just a game. Where can we take some investment risks for outsiz returns because everything's now finalized, you know, everywhere else.

I'm also building a house right now, doing 0% of the work. I have an excellent crew building me a house that it's just going so well. Knock on wood. And I'm absolutely knocking on my desk on purpose. I want to knock on that wood because if anybody has done a house build from the ground up, you know that things can change in a heartbeat. But so far it is on time and on budget. So fingers crossed that that continues. In July, Frank Vasquez came on the show and walked me through creating a portfolio, a risk parody portfolio, golden ratio portfolio. I started with $10,000 in July. I withdrew $42 in July. Right after we created the account, I pulled $42 out. The reason being $42 is 5% of the portfolio divided by 12 for the monthly withdrawals so I could see what was going on monthly. I have withdrawn $42 in July, August, September, October, and November. I withdraw at the end of the month. So, I'm getting ready to make

my final withdrawal of the year. My portfolio value is $11,02 right at this moment that we're recording. So, lots of positions are up and this is after withdrawing. I have more money than when I started and I've been withdrawing 5% or the equivalent of 5%. So, that's been a fun experiment. I'm excited to see what happens in 2026 there.

Sounds like a good year for for both of us here. It was a pretty good year. Now, what what did you start out the year with from a goals perspective? Honestly, I don't think I set any goals this year. I was in a different place in my life. And Scott, working on the 31 days challenge has given me more clarity on goal setting in general and how I can use goals to like encourage myself to get to those goals as opposed to just like, oh, I want to have a good day today. I've never really spent a lot of time on goals before, but I'm really excited to do that this year. How about you? Where did you start at with your goals this year? And how'd you end up?

Well, let's pull them up from last year. Let's see what I what I said uh this time last year. What I wanted to do is I wanted to be a proactive husband and father and create a lot of happy memories, specifically being ready to welcome our incoming baby into the household. I wanted to set Bigger Pockets up for a smooth transition and cheer on the new the new leadership that was going to come into Bigger Pockets and I wanted to transition my portfolio to passive management so that I could begin to live off of it uh in a more robust way on a go forward basis. So I generally accomplished all of those goals and I will also say I layered in after my transition some pretty hardcore fitness goals which I'm sure we'll talk about as we get in here. I did not accomplish all of those fitness goals on there, but they were kind of they were kind of absurd goals that really weren't practical. Uh, which I'm sometimes

guilty of. So, uh, I'm very pleased with my overall progress on the fitness front this year.

Okay, let's let's dive a little bit deeper into that. In November of 2024, you and I had a photo shoot, and at that photo shoot, we weighed the same. Do you mind if I share your weight, Scott?

Uh, sure. Go ahead. Okay. So, we both weighed 190 lbs. I'm 5'4. Scott is How tall are you, Scott? I'm 6'1.

Yeah. So, very different heights. My body should not weigh the as much as Scott's does. And now I have lost 30 pounds. Scott, you have gained 30 lbs. Show Show your muscle, Scott.

Oh, yeah. Look at these. Scott's got some guns. I've been really lifting a lot.

Scott's been on a weight gain journey. I bought a Hope gym and a barbell and I've been doing that almost every single I I've done it almost four days a week for almost the last six months. So, I've been I've been I've been definitely like uh becoming a meatthead here this in the back half of the gym.

But you feel better. Like this is how I know Scott. I met Scott 10 years ago, 11 years ago when he was some young kid that was still playing rugby on a regular basis. Very fit, very into fitness. And as you grew in your corporate job, you're spending more time at work and less time at the gym. So, I'm excited to see your new found old fitness level back, Scott. I know that's really important to you.

I definitely feel better this way. I've tried a number of things. For for me, having a lot of muscle mass, there's a lot of benefits that seem to go along with it for like mental clarity, thinking, the ability to eat more. Um, I've always found it very difficult to control my food intake on a a long-term basis. And having more muscle mass makes that very easy. I actually have to try to eat enough to maintain the muscle mass. So that that means that I, you know, there's a room for that 20% or so of of junk to get in there without being a problem on that front. So I still do a good amount of cardio as well, but I just I just find it easier for me to kind of look and feel good or at least the way I think I look good and feel good by having muscle mass. But everyone's different. That's just that's just my personal preference and that that seems to be working for me now.

Well, yeah, it's it's working great. Scott, you by the way look great. Like we we meet in person probably once every two weeks. You know, we have one scheduled every week. most every other week we probably make it to breakfast and it's just been incredible seeing Mindy's transformation this year.

Yes, I have also joined a gym. I go to F45 if there's any other F45ers out there. I really enjoy the workout because I have I am not like Scott. I didn't grow up working out and playing every sport. I didn't do any of that. So, going to the gym is actually kind of difficult for me because I don't know what I'm doing. So, F45 when you get there, the trainers walk you through the workout that day. It's always a different workout. They walk you through each different station. There's a video screen at the front of the gym that shows you what each station is supposed to be doing in case you forget, which I do a lot. So, I don't have to put any thought into my workout. I just show up and do the work, which has like prevented me from going to the gym. I mean, I was going to the gym. I've been going to the gym for years and making absolutely zero progress. So, seeing progress is so motivating to keep going.

Okay, Scott, we've both had a pretty good 2025. Let's look at your goals for 2026. What has been your historical goal setting process? And what are your goals, personal goals for 2026?

You know, as we all know, I am a huge goal setter. I take it super seriously. I love nerding out about it. I think it's foundational to so many good things in life coming your way eventually. I think you get what you want or at least with the the goals you set eventually in many cases not everyone will do that but I think it's a there will be a fairly high percentage of people who if they are very clear about what they want and work towards it will get it eventually and so I've done this since the moment I graduated college heavily influenced by one of my neighbors shout out to Adam August thank you for all you've done for me um Adam is a big goal setter and gave me this journal from uh the success guru named Darren Hardy called living your best year ever when I was right when I was graduating college and I've been fortunate enough to just keep doing that every year. I actually bought a bunch of

these journals and handed them out to people over the years. No affiliation with Darren Hardy, just like his stuff. What that evolved to when I got married, Virginia and I went uh on our honeymoon, we I made her uh sit down and and and talk about our our life vision uh on there and and kind of brought a draft and it was great. We did it for our honeymoon for like, you know, 20 15 20 minutes, maybe 30 minutes. And it's so funny looking at that, you know, 5 6 years later and seeing, yes, there's some differences in there. But what's remarkable is how much of that has stayed the same and how much of that is now actually our reality. There's lots of privilege and luck that goes into that. But that I also believe that you can't get exactly what you want if you don't know exactly what you want. So an output of that looks kind of like this document. I'm sharing my screen here.

This is the BP money goal setting template. We tried to distill a free goal setting process. This is just available at biggerpocketsmoney.com/resources if you want to download that and try it out. We kind of have this vision. It's just like a like a one page of of a piece of paper that says here's what our home looks like and this is an update for this year. It's got our two kids, our our handsome kitty cat Fred. What does our our day-to-day lifestyle look like? How are things going? What what are our work commitments? So, what does our weekday look like? What does our week ends look like? What's our community look like? What's our physical fitness? how's our financial position in our situation? And this is just that one-page document. And all of our goals derive from this document. So, um, we updated this last quarter and we'll update it again this quarter. Every quarter a sentence or two changes, but

it's remarkable again how much now stays consistent each time we visit revisit the document. And it's really helpful to ground ourselves in the next quarter goals to make sure that they are derived from this document and making sure that they're continuing to either maintain or improve upon that life vision. So that's where it all starts for Virginia and I and for my goal setting process here on a regular basis.

Scott, I love this document so much that I made it day two of the 31-day challenge that we're doing for our listeners, our audience. If you would like to get a better handle on your entire financial picture, sign up for our 31-day challenge at biggerpocketsmoney.com/31dys. It is a free challenge. Every day you'll get an email with a task to help you get a better handle on your finances, to help take your finances to the next level. And this document, Scott, when you first showed me this document that you created, I was like, "This is amazing." And Carl and I went and sat down outside of our house, completely separate, no distractions, and sat down to fill this out. We didn't get it all done in one day cuz of course we had other things that we had said yes to already, but we are so excited to be more in line with each other and just having this conversation, start thinking about the goals that we want. I love

this from a 5-year perspective. What does your life look like? I got some big goals to accomplish in the next five years and I'm really excited about them. So Scott, what are some of your goals

for 2026? I kind of have four of categories of goals. They're family, fitness, entrepreneurship in the sense of Bigger Pockets Money and then uh my some lifestyle goals. Notably, this is the first year I do not have a financial goal. Um I do have an some entrepreneurship goals, but I'll share those in a second. Actually, I'll start with those. They're third on my list, but I'll start with them here on the business front. There's kind of three top goals here. one is I really want to build a really high quality suite of DIY financial planning tools for the Bigger Pockets community. I think that um there's an opportunity for folks to prof like this concept of a financial plan to distill that and personalize it and build it yourself and then decide if you want to bring that to a financial planner for that extra eye or extra feedback. But I think that's a really big the next level for Bigger Pockets

Money listeners. And I think that will help a lot of people. And I think we can prepopulate them, you and I, Mindy, with, you know, 10 or 25 of the most common types of situations we've encountered from Bigger Pockets Money listeners to give folks a really good starting point on that journey. So I think that's really fun and we'll have a lot of impact. Um, we'll make all of that free. We probably will make money somehow from that with ads or, you know, if you need Monarch money to to set your financial position, we have a partnership with them. But I think that that will be a really powerful um outcome for the community. Similarly, I want to learn how to vibe code and code software and I want to build a financial planning software uh application that's along those same lines. You want to do it on PDF and Excel, great. You want to do it on a software, here it is. It's free. And just kind of make all that

that that stuff free. I think that's that's a really fun project. It's a great kind of like professional output for the thoughts and the skills and the knowledge that you and I have built up over all these years. I think that's a great way to to just spit it out into something that could be useful for the world. And then the last one is to make sure that the business is cash flow positive and continue to grow on that front. And so that's those are kind of the three goals for entrepreneurship. Let's go next with uh with my family goals. So I have this kind of goal of a high level of having the best year of marriage um with Virginia ever. And that involves a cadence of activity. It's not so what is this what is the stuff that needs to happen every week and every day to make that happen? And those kind of spit out to number of trips, our weekly meeting, weekly dates and walks and games and talks. I want to have events

with friends, family, and neighbors that are pleasant for our whole family. I want to have regular giggles, full presence at family time with our two little girls. I want to make sure that our girls are developing appropriately. And I want to make sure that household equity is in balance this year. That was something that got way out of balance, especially in the last few years with my job as CEO. And I have a lot of work to do to rectify that imbalance and want to work on that in the course here of 2026 and 2027. So those are kind of my highle family goals for fitness. I'm not sure if these are absurd or not. So I don't know. I have never actually trained the way I'm training right now. So I'll see if I can if I can get to these, but I think a pretty ambitious set of goals here. This whole like protocol I've built out here. I got the protocol word from Andrew Huberman who I was a huge fan of before the the Herm protocol

emerged. I still think he provides really good valuable information here. But I kind of have this goal of like I want to look strong and lean. I want to meet objectively high strength and aerobic standards. And I want to feel and look young and energized. And that involves weightlifting goals which spit out to a 315 bench for six, a 405 squat for six, and a 495 deadlift for six. And I also want to supplement that with running over time and build up to a place where I can do four lifts and four runs in a week. And that will take me a lot of time. I found that that can really drain my body if I try to do it too quickly. So, I want to build to that over the course of the year. And ideally, that will spit out with me being able to hit those weightlifting benchmarks and run a sub 20-minute 5K.

Now, that may be absurd. I don't know, but I'm going to try it and see how far I can get and see if that that really begins to hurt or cause problems for me. And if it does, I'll dial it back. I have a diet goal. I have a recovery protocol here with certain supplements I'm taking. Nothing nothing crazy. Just protein, creatine, fish oil, and a multivitamin. Sleep and a sauna. And then I have uh skin and hair care and uh prevention and screening like uh all that kind of good stuff uh around blood work. And so that's kind of the goal.

And I'm not too far off from these numbers right now. It will definitely take a lot of hard training for me to get to that those goals. We will work around the recordings of this show to a certain degree to make sure that I'm able to accommodate those cuz I I have to do my workout once in the morning, one in the afternoon. It's separated by six hours on the days I do two a days. That's my kind of fitness goal. And then from a lifestyle perspective, I I've added this in. I want to hit 10 weekday ski days, 10 weekday hikes, 10 weekday bikes. I want to do four trips with Virginia. I want to do one or two solo trips with friends or family, maybe go see an Eagles football game. I'm a big Philadelphia Eagles fan. Would love to go out to the link. I've actually never gone to a game at the link. I am a League of Legends player. I want to get to the next rank in that game. I won't tell everyone what that rank is because

then they'll make fun of me for how much I play and all that kind of stuff. And I want to average 10,000 steps. I will not accomplish all of those. That's I always I set big goals and I I get a good chunk of progress each year. I look at them, but I I will not hit all of those goals. Those are all stretch goals. Those are if I accomplish even a 50% of them, I'll be very thrilled with 2026.

Wow. So, my goals and goal setting is uh slightly less robust. Sorry, Vindy. I just go crazy with this stuff every year. I can't help myself.

Well, and you've been How long have you been out of college? 20 years, 30 years.

12 years. Yeah. 12 years. Okay. So, you've been doing this for 12 years. I have been hearing since I was out of college that you should be setting goals, you should have goal setting, blah blah blah blah. I don't actually do that or I haven't historically done that. And I I would love to do that, but then you know, life jumps in the way. Anybody listening who is more mind than Scott, don't feel bad that you haven't historically set goals. Now is a great time to change that. And next year's a great time to change that.

And the year after that is a great time to change that. So, please don't compare your goal setting journey, especially at the beginning, to Scott's 12 years in really kind of obsessed with setting goals goal setting journey. He's got a two-page document just on his fitness. I just want to get to the gym 5 days a week for at least 35 weeks next year. I don't know if that's that's quite the same. I'm not going to be doing the the 495 lb deadlifts that you're doing. Although, I did get to 99 lbs recently. Woohoo. I have lots of different parts of my body that need to be worked on before I can actually get more weight on that bar. Uh my elbow gets really sore.

Like my hands aren't strong enough to hold the bar. So there's just lots of things preventing me from that 495 lb deadlift goal that you have, Scott. Pretty sure I'll never have that same goal. But again, Scott's goals are Scott's goals. And there his stretch goals at that. So don't feel bad that your goals aren't the same.

This can be really unhealthy for me. I have this ultra competitive streak in me and I need an outlet for it and I'm so glad to have a very healthy place for that in my fitness protocol which is really where I will I'll be pouring in the sweat.

I think that acknowledging that your level of obsession with your goals is good but also do you feel like you have to check in on these every single day and if you didn't accomplish it you're a worthless human being or are you like a I better try harder next time?

No, I I I I start with what I think is optimal. like what does what does good look like? And then I do not I do I guess that's the other thing is I do not beat myself up if I miss these goals on there.

I think that's really important because if you did beat yourself up then it's an unhealthy goal setting. So anybody listening, if you've got these goals and you're like, "Oh, I'm such a terrible person cuz I didn't meet them." Stop. You're doing too much goal setting. However, if you're more like Mindy, you're like, "Yeah, I heard about goal setting, but I've never done it my whole life." Like maybe you should have a little bit more focus. I'm like kind of hardcore about this. This is a core habit I've developed. I think there's a lot of healthy things that this has brought into my life and a lot of continuous improvement. I I'm able to to continue moving forward. And I think that I'm I'm starting to here in 2026 begin to move away from this accumulation of money as a primary life goal for the first time, which is which is good. And I think that in in three to five years, these goals are going to

look very different. and I'm going to have really developed my philosophy to many of the things that Frank Vasquez, I go back and forth with him every day now on Facebook chat um about various things is going to influence on there and I think I'll I'll have yet another turn of the page or revolution in my my thinking on that front.

Okay, Scott, I really like the very different goal setting histories that we have because I think that there's going to be some people who are just like you. Your goal setting and hyperfocus allowed you to become CEO of Bigger Pockets at age 28. Let me just say that I was not CEO of anything at age 28 and now you have no money goals at age 35 cuz like you've already done it. Meanwhile, I still have money goals and I'm 53. It's a very different position. I don't think you're right. I don't think I'm right. I think we're just different people. So, different people are going to come at it in different ways. So long as you're not beating yourself up when you don't make your goals, but instead changing your mindset. Okay, maybe that goal was too much or okay, let me figure out I haven't been focusing on that, which is why I haven't reached it yet. Let me put more focus into that. My focus, my

personal goals this year are to get to the gym 5 days a week for at least 35 weeks next year. I fully believe that I I know I've got several weekl long vacations where I'm not going to get to the gym. I'm probably going to get sick. There's going to be days week weeks that I don't get there five days, but getting to the gym 5 days a week, it makes me feel better every day. First of all, I get there at 7:30, then I'm done. I don't have to do it anymore that whole day. It's great. Knock it all out. But I'm feeling better. I'm feeling stronger. I'm feeling healthier just because I've got this regular cadence.

And I'm seeing results. That's the big thing, seeing results. So, if your gym isn't doing it for you, maybe try a new gym that has a different focus or maybe, you know, get there more frequently than once a month because that's probably not going to get you the results either. I want to host Friday night dinners. I live in Longmont, the formerly known as the Mr. Money Mustache HQ is now being rebranded into a social club called the FI Collective. and we host a lot of events there where there's multiple people and I'm talking to a lot of people, but because there's so many people there, I don't get a lot of one-on-one time with people. I would like to have one-on-one time with people. So, every Friday in 2026, or at least 35 of the 52 Fridays in 2026, I would like to host people at my house so I can have a more intimate conversation.

and like you want to have a better relationship with Virginia. Carl and I are celebrating 24 years of marriage on January 19th and yay, we've got a great marriage, but it's really easy for we've got a great marriage, therefore I don't have to work on it to become more prominent in your mind or even like in the back of your mind. So, I want to do weekly dates with Carl and I don't guess that I'm gonna get 52 of them, but I think I can get 35. 35 is a really great goal. That's 35 weeks next year I'm going to succeed because I do want to continue to have a really great relationship with Carl. And I've started creating a bucket list. Carl and I sat down and we were on a a cross-country drive and we added a ton of stuff to our bucket list. I really like football and I have only been to the Chicago Bears Soldier Field Stadium. Old Soldier Field, not the new toilet bowl one. One of our bucket list items is to see a

game in every NFL stadium. So, in that case, I am more aggressive than you in my goal setting, Scott, because you only want to see one stadium. I want to see all 32.

I love these goals. Like, I like these are these are fantastic. But wait, there's more. Professionally, I want to improve my social media and Bigger Pockets money social media because we don't really we kind of ignore it. And I think there's there's lots of ideas that I have in my head that don't actually pan out for a show, but could be like a 2-minute video somewhere or a 30- secondond video somewhere. So, that's something that I want to do to just continue to give our audience more information. I want to continue to grow our show, our brand new website, which is biggerpocketsmoney.com, and what we're giving to our audience.

you're doing a lot of the heavy tech lifting and I'm never going to compete with you for that. But like I mentioned earlier, we've got this 31-day email challenge. That was so much fun for me to, you know, collaborate with you and with Bobby and with Blake on what the ideas were and then to write out those emails. I'm super excited to see how this goes. If anybody is looking to get a better handle on their finances, again, that's the 31-day free email challenge that you can sign up for at biggerpocketsmoney.com/31days.

And it's a self-led. You can skip a day and then go back and do two tasks the next day or just, you know, push it out longer. It's a pretty heavyduty task list, but you will have a much better handle on your finances once you get yourself through it. Financially, I want to finish building the house that we are building, sell my current house, and a stretch goal is to hit 8 figures in net worth. That'll be kind of fun. And of course, get a better handle on my finances as I do that 31-day challenge because that is a totally do as I say, not as I do. I have not done all of the tasks yet. Yeah, I I will say that um I didn't include a personal finance goal because I don't it's not I don't really have a goal of growing my my net worth this year, but that I did kind of cheat by saying that I want to actually complete all of the outputs that we're putting together for 2026, including the 31day uh financial planning challenge

and including a updated DIY financial plan using the best practices that I plan to develop over the course of the next year for myself. So that should spit out good results and it's kind of cheating in the context of not having a financial goal, but it's really just about maintaining best practices for me versus how do I grow this? There's other there's other goals now. I think these are great goals, Mindy, and I think that they're very achievable for you as long as you don't get injured. That's my big mistake in in uh all these lifting protocols over the years is I would do too much and get injured. And so that's this is very cautious moving in that direction for me. I think you're going to have a wonderful 2026.

I think you're going to have a great 2026. The deliver regular giggles to your girls is such a sweet sweet goal.

That is one where I feel bad. I'm like, I didn't I never I I didn't make my my little baby or Katie laugh today, you know? It's one where I I will beat myself up a little a little bit uh at the end of a day or or a week.

I will encourage you to take a ton of pictures. I am not really a picture taker, but Carl is. So, we've got so many pictures of the girls from when they were little. And Katie will love to go back and look at what she was like when she was a baby, just like Taylor will. So, showing them little videos. If they say something cute, there were several times that like several things that Claire said that we never got on video. So, I just encourage you to take all the pictures you possibly can.

Minnie, one one fun thing is uh there was a goal of doing uh trips with the girls from a few years ago. Then we had two little kids and that is no longer cost to do the trips to do lots of trips with the girls. We need a couple of getaways as adults here. Uh we love our little girls very much and we look forward to trips with them, but maybe when they're like a couple years older. I know some people can do it, but we found it very challenging.

I don't know who said this, but I read somewhere they said if you have small children, you're not on vacation. You're just parenting in a different location. So, I totally am on board with you pulling back on the family trips for a while cuz it's a lot.

I don't know what you guys what what everyone listening does. There's no like real wrong way to do this. You don't need to set goals if that's not your thing here, but I have found it very helpful for me personally. And again, if you want to use the template that Virginia and I use or a uh free version of that, go to biggerpocketsmoney.com/resources and look for the goal setting template. You can download as a PDF or open it as a Google docu on there. And then if you do want that journal that I've used all these years, it's called Living Your Best Year Ever by Darren Hardy. You can Google that and go find it online. It's kind of kind of expensive. It's like 40 bucks out there. But uh I found a little nice little journal that helps me keep my my weekly progress and I'm addicted to it. That's my that's my pattern now.

It's set and I found great value in that kind of stuff. So some some version of that, you know, I think is is so helpful. And and one last tip I'll use is if you are going to get into the the goal setting thing and and make it, you know, this next year your your your big push for that, I think give yourself some grace. It's really hard to stay on track every single day. But one thing that I found much more achievable is to every Sunday spend 15 to 30 minutes just planning out the week and making sure, hey, I said these were my top three goals. Am I doing at least one or two things to progress each of them this week? And even if you don't hit those goals, if you just plan them out and look at them every Sunday, you will eventually make those first a lot of how many how how often is the next step on a key goal just sending an email or blocking time on your calendar. How often is it just like as simple as that

to make it happen? And that's what that power that that does for you um and just reminds you of what you need to do to to make that stuff happen.

Yep. And if you find yourself in several weeks drought between checking in on your goals, just start over. You don't have to say, "Oh, I got to wait till next January to do it again. I am fully expecting to fall short of some of my goals and to fall short on my checking in with my goals." Uh, oh, you know what, Scott? I'm going to put that in my calendar. Check in on my goals every Monday because if it's not in my calendar, it's not getting done. I love that. If you do it 10 weeks next year and you haven't done it been doing it for a while, you might find pretty remarkable progress on it. Even if you only do it one every five weeks, you're are you are you thinking about checking on your goals? But so don't beat yourself up if you're not if you're not doing this every single week. I do not do this every single week. I'm I'm a big goal setter and my consistency is definitely hit or miss over the years,

but I never go six months without progressing against something, you know? That that's the that's the real key been the real key for me over the over the years, I think.

Yeah, that's awesome, Scott. All right. So, if your goal is to get your finances in order or to get a better handle on your finances or to take your finances to the next level, join us in our 31day free email challenge, which is biggerpocketsmoney.com/31day. All right, Scott, should we get out of here?

Let's do it. That wraps up this episode of the BiggerpocketsMoney podcast. He is Scott Trench. I am Mindy Judson saying gotta go

Questions about this episode

What is discussed in "How to Set Financial Goals and Actually Achieve Them (2026)"?

In order: 0:00 Bigger Pockets Money, Mindy Jensen, Scott Trench; 5:00 Frank Vasquez; 10:00 Adam August, Darren Hardy, Living Your Best Year Ever; 15:00 Bigger Pockets Money, League of Legends; 20:00 Frank Vasquez; 25:00 Bigger Pockets Money; 30:00 Darren Hardy, Living Your Best Year Ever, Scott Trench.

What is mentioned in this BiggerPockets Money episode?

9 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Bigger Pockets Money, Bigger Pockets Money 31-Day Challenge, Scott Trench, Frank Vasquez, Darren Hardy, Living Your Best Year Ever. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "How to Set Financial Goals and Actually Achieve Them (2026)"?

The episode runs 34 min; the transcript is about 7,307 words in 69 timestamped sections.

More from BiggerPockets Money

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated January 24, 2026.