I have learned this phrase but I am not sure how to use it properly.
These are sentences I wrote.Could you check them if they were written grammatically correctly?
1.Having a college degree only goes so far to reach your goals in a life.
2.Having a college degree only goes so far on reaching your goals in a life.
3.Having a college degree only goes so far for reaching your goals in a life.
4.Average pensions only go so far meets your need of money.
5.Even being filhty-rich could make you happy only go so far, if you don't have real friends.
6.Beauty/ being good-looking only goes so far …help making new friends.
(You can rewrite my sentences too,as long as the meanings don't change much.I would be happy if you give more examples.)
Thank you
Best Answer
If you check out some written instances of "only goes so far", you'll see it's relatively uncommon to follow this expression with an additional prepositional phrase.
Probably in consequence of this, it's often not easy to say which specific preposition is most appropriate in any given context. Taking OP's first couple of examples, I'd probably go for towards/in + gerund...
...but in practice I'd most likely restructure things to avoid the trailing prepositional phrase...
As currently presented, none of OP's examples are idiomatically acceptable to me. But they contain many errors irrelevant to the usage under consideration, and would mostly benefit from significant rephrasing as per my (b) above. My general advice would be...