5 tips for how you can achieve your re­tire­ment sav­ings goals the easy way

Does this sound familiar? After all that indulgence over Christmas, you resolve to do great things in the new year. This is why gyms sell so many memberships in January and are often so full. By the time February rolls around though the empty spaces have returned, because everyday life has already caught up with most of us. After you’ve put one gym session off until tomorrow and cut another one short, the whole fitness regime soon falls apart like a house of cards. The whole idea gets put on hold, because getting your body ready for summer still seems a long way off.

If your New Year’s resolutions go no further than just being good ideas, you’re not the only one. Studies have shown that 88% of all New Year's resolutions remain unfulfilled, which means that only 1 in 10 ideas actually become a reality.

There are a number of reasons for this, the most important of which include:

• Wanting to do too much all at once: it’s often harder to change your patterns of behaviour than you expected, and when you have set your goals too high, it’s hard to see the progress you've made and you give up more easily.
• Overplanning instead of simply getting started: a common reason is wanting to do everything perfectly and never getting started as a result. It’s helpful here to concentrate on where you can make the biggest difference and to forget about the details. Better to just get started than to think too much about the perfect time or the perfect plan.
• Lack of motivation: you know what you want, but don’t really know why you want to achieve this goal and what it will do for you. You want to get fit, but why? When it’s not clear what your motivation is, that motivation can often fall by the wayside.

It’s a similar story with money and retirement planning as it is with fitness. You need clear goals, energy and discipline. Here are a few tips for how you can make sure your resolutions related to retirement planning become a reality:

Unlike with fitness training, retirement planning doesn’t mean having to keep on putting in the effort. You can be on track right from January onwards with just a few simple steps. And the best thing is, you can tick off your New Year’s resolutions as done without really doing that much.