What's a "real" financial goal, I ask Carl Richards, a certified financial planner and creator of the Sketch Guy, his weekly column in the New York Times. I ask this, rather cynically, after reading that his book The Behavior Gap, Simple Ways to Stop Doing Dumb Things with Money can help you identify your "real" financial goals. Like his sketches, Richards's answer is elegantly simple: "Real financial goals are those you've taken the time to define versus a vague sense of worry. Almost no one has them [real financial goals]. I regularly get e-mails from readers of my column saying: 'I don't have goals.'" If we're honest, the same could be said of many of us. We have a vague end in mind, something we imagine in our future. It may be retirement or being debt-free or taking an overseas holiday, but we've not taken the time to define it. For example, an overseas holiday could be anything from a week on a beach in Croatia to one month walking the Camino de Santiago trail. It depends on y...
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