We Still Don't Have Any Real Goals!

Since beginning this blog about a month ago, I thought my fiance and I would have sat down by now and come up with some real goals that we could try to hold ourselves to. Up until now, we have sat down and came up with a retirement goal. We are actually contributing quite a bit of money every month to try to reach this goal. But we haven't really talked about much else.

We also have our wedding coming up next June. We have discussed an informal plan of how to pay for it and we have stuck to that plan, so that is good.

I would like to sit down and come up with some other goals that we can strive to achieve and that have deadlines. Some of my ideas are going to revolve around:

1) Strategies to earn more money (get promoted, get bonuses, generate alternate income ideas)
2) Work to pay off both of our student loans early. My fiance's will be paid off in mid-2008 and mine will be done in mid-2009. But I think we can pay them off faster if we set our minds to it.
3) Setting goals to save up for a house (even if it is just a little bit).
4) Being smarter about how we allocate the money we save every month. We currently put money in quite a few different accounts set up to pay for travel, furniture, house down payment, car expenses, gifts....etc. But we don't really work together on these. I would like to have set amounts we are trying to save and dates we need to accomplish this by.
5) Striving to anticipate non-recurring expenses in time to pay for them without going into debt. We got caught with our pants down this month by not saving for gifts for the 5 or 6 weddings we are attending. Christmas will be our next big challenge and I think we should address that soon.

As I'm writing this, I realize we appear to be on the right path (i.e., we are already saving a lot of money), but I think we lack a way to measure our success. In addition, I think things are very haphazard and we aren't challenging ourselves very hard.

Sometimes we informally talk about a lot of goals, but we don't get them down on paper. We are also very weak and bad influences on each other. For example, we will informally agree to spend less, and within two hours, one of us is calling the other with plans to go out to dinner. And of course, there is no argument.

Hopefully someone can share what has worked for them in achieving their goals!