Just over six months ago, I laid out some goals and plans for 2008. In that time, my life has changed in huge ways more than once, including getting a promotion and finding out we’re going to have another child. All of these changes in such a short time have left us in a different situation than what we started. That means, it’s time to revisit and tweak the goals for 2008 to match our new reality.
In December, I laid out six goals. Here’s how they ended up:
- Completely pay off the car loan – With finding out that we’re going to have a second child, we need to purchase another baby-safe vehicle. While we’re still making good headway in paying off the car, the CD we took out for that purpose will now be reserved for a down payment on a mini-van. Fortunately, we’re pretty flexible when it comes to these plans.
- Start my business – I did start my business, but I never really put in the time necessary to let it grow. When we found out about the new baby, I pretty much put the business idea on the back burner since I’d rather spend my days being a dad than working all the time.
- Track expenses and build a budget – I closely tracked our expenses for a little over three months until I determined that things weren’t nearly as bad as we originally thought. The data was useful, but it didn’t really reveal any huge holes – probably because I knew I was tracking the expenses. I eventually abandoned the tracking in favor of just keeping a close eye on general income and expenses.
- Tithe to my church – So far this year, we’ve given $2,600 to our church. In order to tithe, I must give 10% of my income to the church. Considering my current salary of $70k, I should have given $3,500 by now. I doubt we’ll be able to close that $900 gap by the end of the year, but I do take comfort in knowing that we’re giving more this year than in any year in the past – both number- and percentage-wise.
- Put aside 6% of my income into my 401(k) – In order to get the full benefit of my employer’s match, I have to withhold 6% of my salary into the 401(k). I’m glad to say that we’ve been faithful to this goal for the whole year. Even though the market has been a painful experience this year, we certainly aren’t going to withdraw from investing.
- Rebuild our emergency fund – We have made advances on our emergency fund and grew our savings by over $2,000 over this year, we are still well short of having 6 month’s worth of income saved up. Excluding our self-managed tax and insurance escrow, we stand at just over 30% of the way there at $10,800. This is a goal that will take a long time to reach, but we continue to move in that direction.
The goals I laid out in December were admirable goals, but most of them were vague with no real way of determining success. I’ve since learned to use real numbers in my plans instead of nebulous ideas, so it would be most appropriate to rebuild my goals for the remainder of the year with that in mind:
- Read and review two personal finance books – I already have one book in progress, Does Your Bag Have Holes?, that I won from a Clever Dude contest. I have a few other books in mind, but we’ll see what I come up with after I finish this one.
- Increase our total savings to $16,000 – If you count our CD (and exclude our tax and insurance escrow), we have somewhere around $13,900 in savings. It shouldn’t be too much trouble to save an extra $2,000. The only bump in the path of this goal would be if we needed to touch our emergency fund for some reason, but that’s something you really can plan for, anyway.
- Earn $1,000 in side income – So far, I have brought in $664, which means I only have to earn another $336 over the rest of the year. Since the business is now ended and the last of its contracts are finishing up, that means I’ll have to be creative in finding ways to earn extra money. This blog is a possibility, but it has not proven itself to be a “big earner” for me yet.
- Give $5,600 to my church – While this amount still falls short of tithing, it does force us to consider increasing the amount we give to the church weekly. I don’t remember exactly how much we gave last year, so I will definitely revise this number up if I find that we gave more last year.
- Decrease our long-term non-mortgage debt to $35,000 – We’ve already made great headway this goal by knocking out almost $4,000 in non-mortgage debt this year. If we continue on our current pace, we should be able to reach $35,000 without too much pain.
To encourage me to go beyond just meeting some attainable goals, I also want to plan some more difficult “stretch goals” that will signal unexpected success. Here is what I would like to see happen above and beyond my original goals:
- Give $7,000 to my church – Tithing shouldn’t be a stretch goal, but it must be for this year. This is important to me, so I’m listing it first.
- Earn $500 through blogging – Like I said before, my blog isn’t a big earner yet, but if I worked hard I could reach $500. It wouldn’t be a stretch goal if it wasn’t hard!
- Start a Vanguard account – To start up a non-IRA Vanguard account, I need to scrape together $3,000 to buy one of their index funds. I would love to get into investing outside of my 401(k), but there are other needs that must be met first. If we can find $3,000 that would be safe to invest, I want to jump on this as soon as possible.
Overall, I think I’ve set some attainable, but aggressive goals. If we can meet all of our base goals and at least one of the stretch goals, I will consider this year a resounding success. Let’s see what the next 6 months have in store.
