Hello and

welcome back to Money Girls Quick and Dirty Tips for Our Ritra Life.

I'm your host, Laura Adams. To help you take charge of your finances in 2010,

we're going to address the five pillars of personal finance one at a time.

So this post is the first of a five-part series. Each topic will

help you build a strong financial foundation. The topic we'll cover today is

about setting financial goals. The first step to creating financial goals for a new year

is to evaluate the old year.

Ask yourself what went right and what went wrong

over the past 12 months.

Maybe you didn't save as much for an emergency fund as you'd

planned. Perhaps you were unemployed for some time and got really behind on paying your bills.

Now's the time to make peace with the past and to get serious about creating a better financial future.

Decide what you'd like to accomplish in both the short term and the long term.

For example, a good short term goal might be to pay off a credit card or to save money to start a

part-time business. If you want to save $3,000 over the course of a year you can

break that goal up into manageable amounts like $250 a month

58 a week or $8.22 a day a worthy long-term goal would be to consistently

fund a retirement account or perhaps to save for a child's education.

I've created three action steps in this post to help you create and accomplish your unique financial goals.

The first step is to assess your unique financial goals.

The first step is to assess your current financial situation

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