Achieving your financial goals can feel like an uphill battle. Whether you’re saving for a down payment on a home, your child’s education, or a comfortable retirement, it’s easy to fall short.

Often, it’s not just a lack of income that gets in the way but a mix of common pitfalls and behavioral tendencies. The first step to overcoming these challenges is to understand them, so here’s a closer look at four common reasons why people struggle to reach their financial goals.

Lack of a clear plan

It’s hard to reach your financial goals when you don’t have a specific plan for achieving them. A vague objective like “I want to save more money” is easy to lose track of. Without a detailed roadmap, it’s difficult to know what steps to take, how much to save, or how to prioritize your spending.

Successful financial planning involves setting SMART goals: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. For example, instead of “save for a house someday,” a better aim would be “save $50,000 for a down payment in the next five years.” This specificity gives you a clear objective and a timeline, making it easier to track your progress and stay motivated.

Lifestyle inflation

As your income increases, it’s natural to want to enjoy a better quality of life. This can lead to a phenomenon called lifestyle inflation, where your spending rises in proportion to your earnings. For instance, a new promotion might mean upgrading to a bigger apartment, buying a more expensive car, or dining out more frequently. And while these luxuries are enjoyable, they can severely stunt your ability to save and invest. The key is to be mindful of this tendency and to consciously decide to set aside a portion of any income increase before you increase your discretionary spending.

Not automating savings

When it comes to saving, consistency is key, and if you wait until the end of the month to see what’s left over, you could find yourself disappointed. That’s why automating your saving and investment payments is one of the most effective ways to build your accounts. By setting up automatic transfers on payday, you remove the temptation to spend the money and ensure that you are consistently funding your financial goals.

Emotional and psychological biases

Our financial decisions aren’t always rational because we’re often swayed by emotions and psychological biases. Overconfidence bias, for example, might lead you to believe you can time the market or select winning stocks better than you actually can, resulting in risky decision-making. On the other hand, loss aversion might make you feel the pain of lost funds more intensely than the joy of an equivalent gain (i.e., losing vs. gaining $1,000), which can cause you to hold onto depreciating investments for too long. Fear of missing out, meanwhile, can push you into making trendy investments without conducting sufficient research.

Recognizing these biases and avoiding them is crucial for making sound, long-term financial decisions. But because it’s not always easy to do this on your own, it’s that much more important that you work with a financial professional. They can provide an objective, third-party perspective on major money moves before you make them. With the right guidance and strategies in place, you may be able to clear the way toward actualizing your goals.