2007: Time for action

  • Published
  • By Col. Jeffrey P. Hilovsky
  • 512th Aerospace Medicine Squadron commander
DOVER AIR FORCE BASE, Del. --  The best part of a new year is the slate is wiped clean. It gives us an opportunity to build on our past successes and reflect upon the opportunities we had last year to improve. So, I hope all of you have taken the time to set your goals for 2007.

Allow me the opportunity to share what has become an integral part of my life for many years: my goal setting process. I have several types of goals I write down and commit to achieve every year.

First, I have personal goals, which involve family, spiritual growth and personal development. Next, I commit to list professional goals: both military and non-military. Usually, those goals include professional development through reading, distance learning and conference attendance. Lastly, I write down monetary and business goals I wish to achieve such as increasing business revenue and profit and personal savings, and improving retirement planning goals and office and staff efficiencies. I check my goals at least monthly and monitor my implementation plan to note successes and opportunities for improvement.

In the military, we are great at advanced planning - in a way goal setting. We plan for exercises months in advance and inspections years in advance. We create time lines and milestone charts to track our progress to ensure success.

In our personal lives, I wonder if we take the time to do the same. For example, do we take the time to plan for retirement? I'm not referring to military retirement but civilian retirement. Many of us feel retirement is many years away, but building a secure financial retirement takes years of planning and goal setting.

One out of every six people in this country work past age 65, not necessarily because they want to, but because they have to in order to survive: their retirement expenses exceed their retirement income. Do you want to be a part of this statistic? Over the next 20 years 7,900 Americans will turn 60 every day.

More people are retiring and becoming eligible to collect on the Social Security tax. The problem is the number of employed individuals paying this tax is dwindling. To add to the problem, thankfully we are living longer; therefore we are collecting payments far in excess of the taxes we paid into the system. We need to be prepared for the instability of our Social Security system.

The Wall Street Journal reported as a Nation, our personal saving's rate is at its lowest rate in history (nearly zero); yet, the average monthly installment debt, not including mortgage payments, is over $7,000. With the impending fall of the Social Security system, and a nation burdened with personal debt and minimal savings, the future for those sitting idle without a firm set of financial goals is bleak.

Planning for your financial future should follow a disciplined and systematic approach.
There are many ways to help calculate and predict your future cash needs for retirement. The tools to make such calculations are readily available for free on the internet. Financial calculator programs can give you a look at what dollar value it will take in the future to meet your expectations of a comfortable retirement. Most financial calculators will provide a way to do "what if" type of scenarios so you can know in advance how much you will need to meet your goals, and tell you how much you need to save so you can get there.

For those of you in your 20s, you have the advantage of time and the power of compound interest working the hardest for your financial future. For the rest of us, we need to understand the reality of how financial inactivity has placed us at a slight disadvantage. We need to act more aggressively in implementing our financial plan. It's our duty and responsibility to ourselves and our families to plan for our financial future.
The urgency is real, the time is now: set goals; invest the time to become financially literate; get some professional advice; put a plan in place and execute it today.