Update on Goals

It seemed like I was waiting for January to pass and before I knew it, it's almost the middle of February.

First, I want to say thank you to Well-Heeled for giving me the code for the progress side bars. As you can see, I only have 2 side bars, but if you remember, I had 3 goals for the year. I'm not really sure how to track my fitness goal of running. Maybe I'll put up a progress bar for 13 miles and as progress, I'll put up the farthest I've run without stopping (as of this writing, it's only been 2.5 miles and it's taken me a long time to build up to that length).

For my goal of earning $2000 of online income, I only had a dismal $25.99 for January. I need to spend some time on this blog to put it in a position to earn at least a little bit and start selling some stuff online.

For my goal of obtaining $25,000 in my early retirement goal, I wasn't able to amass the amount I needed and I was hurt by the stock market fluctuations since I have the majority of that money invested in the S&P 500. I'm planning on doing some research on alternate investment ideas and thinking about adopting Millionaire Mommy Next Door's investment strategy. I was able to add $890 to this fund. But since I realized that I would still need to add $1212 a month if I had 9% returns and I had negative returns in this month, I'm going to need to make up for the shortfall. One way I'm going to try and make up for the shortfall is I'm going to add my complete per diem meal allowance gained when traveling minus expenses to my retirement account. This will probably add another $100-$200 per month. On the side bars, I have tracked this as a goal of $16,000 rather than $25,000 since I started out with $9,000 at the beginning of the year.

Also I wanted to say thanks to Brip Blap for including me in the Carnival of Financial Goals III. Check out the carnival to see what other goals people have!