AAR53-Stop Ballparking It: A Real Plan for Saving Toward a Goal

The fourth thing that I wanna avoid here is is just saving cash. The last thing I wanna do is just take some cash, set it in, you know, a safe somewhere or a normal savings account or whatever. I want the money to be growing. And, again, we'll be covering good places that I think you can put money for this kind of savings goal. But the last thing you wanna do definitely is just save cash. That money isn't gonna grow into anything. It's just gonna degrade over time due to inflation. Good day, everyone, and welcome back to At Any Rate. My name is Evan Ray, and we are here to help you make sustainable financial changes without breaking a sweat. And I'm happy, and I hope I just really, really hope that you're happy to say that today is actually gonna be a solo episode. And as usual, solo episodes, it's gonna be covering pretty personal stuff, covering my personal finances, my first personal financial decisions, my mindset around things, and really just diving deep into that without boring the heck, you know, out out of Andrew or another guest, of of going into myself and just sounding very selfish. So today is gonna be covering my personal example of saving towards a goal. I have a goal coming up financially, and I'm just gonna be discussing my mindset behind it, my planning for it, and how I've applied that in the past, how I'll apply in the future. And this is definitely different than our usual saving discussions because we tend to discuss things around general long term savings or or massive savings like a home, some big life decision. Because frankly, that is, in a lot of ways, the most impactful. If you go from not saving for retirement to saving for retirement, that is a much, much bigger flip than, you know, saving for a new laptop in a way that you than you would have otherwise. A laptop is not the goal, so that's not a spoiler. But I just kinda wanna wanna cover that. So this can apply to any, I'd say, short to medium term goal. We'd probably be looking at goals less than two years, I think, because this where this would be most applicable. But to to not bury the lead anymore, the goal for me is going to be a motorcycle trip with my best friend. Long story short, there was there was a YouTube series, where a couple of guys, if if anybody happens to know or cares enough to look it up, it was Ludwig and and Michael Reeves. And it was where they, the first episode, they went over to China. Second second series, they went over to Japan, and they just went, you know, with without any translators, rented a couple motorcycles, and obviously had gear, and they had a they had, like, camera crew that would follow them periodically or whatever. And, …