Your five-year goals should be governed by your lifetime plans. They should serve as stepping stones to your lifetime plans. This means that you must write down your lifetime plans before you begin working on mid-term plans.

With five years to get out of debt, you should be out of debt by the time you achieve this goal, except for your mortgage.

Still, to provide positive motivation, you need goals.

These plans are impermanent. They require annual revisions. I think January 1 is a good day to review and revise your plans. It is traditional. Don't make New Year's resolutions. Revise your plans instead: lifetime, five-year, and short-term. They should be consistent with each other. They should be realistic with respect you your circumstances.

I suggest using 5 by 8 note cards for specifics. Name the goal. Write down a sentence or two as to why you selected it. Then write down some specifics by which you will measure your success in a year.

When you have filled in all of the cards, sort them in order of priority: must do, may do, and could do. Put them in a box. You can also use a data base program to sort them, but this seems like overkill.