Now you have gone through the important steps of identifying what you have now, setting goals and planning how to reach your goals. But, as important as each of these steps is, none of them is as vital as the step of carrying the plan forward and making it work.

In order to construct your personal wealth-building plan, you need to carefully consider what you have now and what you want in the future. As a necessary part of the process of setting a goal, you'll want to make the goal measurable by reducing it to a monetary amount and setting a deadline for attaining it.

What's the best way to set goals that will help motivate you to achieve your personal financial wants and needs?

We've all heard the adage: "Be careful what you wish for, you may get it." A more realistic statement about attaining financial security might be: "Be careful what you wish for and how you plan to get it, or you won't." This may sound pessimistic, but it's really not. You can succeed in reaching your goals for building wealth for your lifetime use and passing it along to your heirs. But, in order to do it, you'll need to do things a bit differently from most people, who rarely create workable personal financial plans, or, if they do, don't follow through long enough to see the benefit in them.

This section and the subsections that will follow will tell you how to make your goal measurable: how to provide yourself with a rather clear picture of the cost of the goal and how close you are to attaining it.

While you may want to write on a clean slate when constructing your plan for building wealth and passing it along to your chosen heirs, you must consider the impact that existing legal documents and arrangements may have on your plans.

Many people figure that if they closely watch and diligently control the expenditure side of the budget, the income side will take care of itself. This may be OK for individuals whose only income is derived from fixed salaries. However, individuals whose incomes vary from month to month — like most small business owners — will want to also track income received as part of the process.

Anyone who goes about setting up a personal financial budget usually is well aware of the importance of accounting for personal expenses. However, recognizing the need to scrupulously account for all expenditures during the reporting period that you choose (monthly, for most people), and actually doing it for long enough to do much good, can be two different matters. Unless you are the type of person who really enjoys record keeping and working with figures, the process of budgeting for expenses can be difficult and tedious. Although it may be hard to see when you start, the time you spend preparing and maintaining your personal budget can yield real financial gains.

Once you've considered the issues of income budgeting and budgeting for expenses, you're ready to build your personal budget.

In a pre-fight scene from one of the "Rocky" movies, Sylvester Stallone's Rocky character looks into the unblinking eyes of his opponent, Mr. T, who, after a long silence and menacing glare, sums up in one word what he will shortly bring to Rocky: "PAIN !" The prospect of creating and sticking to a personal budget may not be as frightening as stepping into the ring with Mr. T, but for most of us it certainly promises (and delivers!) PAIN.

Creating an organized list of your current assets and liabilities is the first step in charting your future financial course.

A journey of a thousand miles may begin with one step, but chances are that you won't know the direction to go unless you first know where you are standing. In much the same way, creating a wealth-building plan should start with a look the assets you have now.

America's traditional optimism about the country's continued economic progress seemed very well-placed in the late 1990s. The economy was expanding rapidly, unemployment reached record lows, and the stock market seemed to hit the stratosphere on a regular basis.

As a small business owner your personal finances are closely tied to how successfully you manage your business finances. But even if business is booming and your company is incredibly well managed (of course!), this does not mean that your personal financial picture will always be so rosy. Maybe one of these statements hits close to your financial situation:

Once you've figured out how to measure your business's productivity, you need to determine whether your productivity is where it should be. This task can be tricky, especially if you're getting this information for the first time. Factors to take into consideration are: