Still Figuring Out Goals for 2009

Ok, so I know that it's almost February, but I'm still thinking about my goals for 2009.

For 2008, I pretty much failed all of my goals.

I'm trying to decide if I should have a bunch of small goals or one or two larger ones. I'm thinking that a bunch of small goals might be easier.

Here are some smaller goals that I'm thinking about:

-Read 12 books
-Earn $100K in annual salary income (I'm pretty close)
-Earn $10K in bonus/other source income
-Exercise 15 minutes each day
-Sell at least $500 worth of stuff on craigslist/Amazon (does not include airline vouchers)
-Post at least 3 times per week
-Track expenses for at least 2 whole months
-Try to really live on a budget. What I mean by this is to pay all of my bill out of one checking account and actually manage to that amount. Right now I pay bills out of my ING checking account and I don't manage it that closely since we have a lot of cash savings in there to take advantage of the checking account rates that are higher than the savings account rates (when you have a higher balance)

I've given myself until Feb 1 to finalize my goals. Any thoughts or comments on other things that I should be thinking about?

How Do You Combat Laziness?

This weekend, C and I didn't have much planned. In fact, on Friday night, we didn't have anything planned. There were two things I wanted to do over the weekend - do the first exercise in Your Money or Your Life together and go through our closets to find some clothes to donate. Tomorrow there is an organization that is picking up used clothes, toys, etc. in our neighborhood and both C and I have been pretty disorganized in our closets. After getting our new bed (Cal king size), the other rooms in our house are overfilled with stuff. If our closets were cleaner and more organized, we could store our extra stuff there (unless we're able to get rid of it).

Well this weekend, C and I went to the gym, went to the Farmer's market, went grocery shopping, saw a movie, went to church, went on a bike ride, and visited some open houses. I also did a lot of cooking after the Farmer's market and C did a lot of dishes after I completed my cooking.

Around 9 pm on Sunday, I realized that we still hadn't done those two things that I wanted to do and I just didn't have the energy to do them. I think next time, I'll just have C and I clean out a few drawers, rather than our whole closets. Maybe smaller goals will help us be more successful in our goals?

How do you accomplish the chores that you're not excited about, but feel that you need to do?

Grocery Costs

On my last credit card statement, C and I spent approximately $500 on groceries. Some of this spending was a bit more than normal due to my mystery shopping, but the amount just seemed outrageous for a family of two. C and I do try to eat healthy and buy organic products, but I think the real issue was shopping without a list. C and I are both pretty big impulse buyers. So for this upcoming credit card statement (the one we're currently in), I told C that we were going to try to spend $100 or $150, at the most. I figured we would be able to spend a lot less since we did buy a lot of food in the prior month. I'm happy to report that with the credit card statement date almost coming to a close, we're definitely under $150, but over $100. Making goals really does help you improve!

NCAA Winnings

I'm so excited! C participated in a Super Bowl pool this year like he does every year. It's a pretty big pool, so while he didn't place first, he was one of the top 5 and won over $150!! This is going to be added to our joint goal.

Today C and I were talking about our trip. This is going to be the trip of a lifetime for us. Things are pretty expensive, especially due to the weak dollar. We can afford to spend what we've budgeted, or more even, but it means giving up on other things we want to spend our money on. Budgeting is about choices and sometimes I just don't know what the right choices are.

Fighting With My Spouse On Spending Money

This past weekend, C and I had a few spats on how we do our financial management. He's been feeling that my goals (early retirement) are unrealistic and that I want to sacrifice too much for something that is unachievable. I've been feeling that he doesn't support me in my goals and has misconceptions of what my definition of retirement is.

It's killing both of us to have these arguments since we normally have a great relationship and we're on the same page for a lot of things.

I agree that I may be too extreme in some of my ideas. Hanging around the PF Blogosphere gives you a skewed point of comparison.


My husband and I agreed to put aside our differences for the weekend, but neither of us is completely happy right now with what the other person is thinking/feeling. In response to what my husband said about my goals being unrealistic, I decided to create a spreadsheet showing what I thought our financial picture would look like if we both retired early.

He was right in that we would probably only be able to semi-retire in our forties. My conservative calculations show that we probably need to generate a fraction of our current income in our forties to enable a comfortable retirement later on. I'm still tweaking the numbers, but it has shown me how important it is for us to agree and focus on our financial goals together. After I get feedback from C, I will post some more details on the assumptions I made. I'm also hoping to make the model a bit more complicated since I left out one key factor - inflation.

My husband may not believe in what I share with him from my readings, but he is a big believer of math. It's amazing what compound interest will do!

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!

Failing Miserably at My Goals

The first month of the year isn't over yet, but I can tell that I'm failing to meet what should be my monthly progress on my annual goals. It's sad to be so early in the year and know that I'm going to need to catch up a lot of lost ground in order to be successful. After the end of the month, I plan to do a formal review showing my exact progress. I wish I could say that I had progressed as far as I should have on at least one of my goals, but I don't think that's the case.

This month has been a tumultuous one, with some potential major changes for 2008. I'm not sure if I'll be living in San Francisco for the whole year (I'm already on a project where I travel out of town on a weekly basis). It's a bit too early to say what kind of changes may be in store, but my husband and I want to ensure that we take advantage of our youth - while still living responsibly, of course. This year may not be as frugal as I would like, but it should be exciting.

Joint Goal

My husband and I have one major joint goal this year – that is to save $15,000 to go on a 4 week vacation. This vacation is going to span multiple countries and it’s a major vacation we want to do before we have kids in a couple of years. C and I have been talking about this vacation for sometime and only recently did we come up with an estimated dollar amount of what we need to save. $15,000 is a significant amount of money. Our estimate has some cushion for currency exchange fluctuations. One area where I have always struggled with is letting my savings dissipate. If we spend less in one area, we usually just spend it in another area and don’t see any real benefit. C and I are going to do our best to save the $15K by cutting our spending in other areas and putting it towards this goal. C always says that we work so we can enjoy our money and we see this as the vacation of a lifetime.

It’s amazing the number of vacations C and I went on in 2007. We went on quite a few vacations to attend the weddings. We counted anything as a vacation if we had to obtain a hotel room for the trip. Unbelievable to me, we actually went on 10 vacations. Several of these vacations were only for 1 or 2 nights for friends’ weddings. We also each went on a single sex vacation with friends – I counted those two trips as one trip. Another trip was completely free from lodging and travel expenses (other than gas) since we drove to that destination and I was able to use points to get us a free hotel room. Since I travel quite a bit for work, I am often able to score personal vacations for little or no cost. So the total cost of our 10 vacations was . . . just over $4,000. When you consider the fact that airfare was involved in several of those vacations, I think that's a reasonable amount of money. I don’t track our expenses that closely, so this is just a ballpark of how much we spent.

Within those 10 trips, there were a lot of free hotel stays (I did not count the trip where we stayed at my friend’s house) and buy 1 get 1 free hotel stays (this was accomplished due to my hotel status). When I change jobs to a less travel intensive project, there is no way we’d be able to vacation so much with so little money!

I might be able to subsidize some of our $15K trip with hotel points and bonuses, but it’s going to be tough. Airfare alone for the both of us will probably be several grand since we’re planning on going to another continent and we will need to take a few more plane trips to get to the different countries we want to visit.

Wow, writing all of this down makes it seem really extravagant. While I do have a goal of retiring early, I am a big believe in conscious spending. You need to spend money on what makes you really happy, rather than letting it slip through your fingers. Lest you think we are living beyond our means, C and I have minimal debt and we do a good job with our savings. Our only debt is less than $10K in student loans. We both maxed out our 401Ks for 2007 and we’re waiting to do our taxes before determining how much we can contribute to our Roth IRAs. I am almost positive we are below the income limit, but I want to do the taxes to be sure. We also have an emergency fund and a house down payment fund.

Monthly Savings Needed for My Early Retirement Goal

I used this nifty savings calculator at one of my favorite financial websites, Bankrate to determine what my monthly savings needs to be in order to hit my $25,000 early retirement goal for 2008.

The calculator is great since it allows you to play with the interest rate.

I inputted in the amount I have today, my goal of $25,000, my time horizon, and tried out different interest rates. The calculator tells you how much you need to put in to be on track. I found that even with a 9% interest rate, I still need to accumulate $1,212 a month! Yikes, that is a lot of money!

So far I have added $425 to the account, but most of that is spill over from December. I need to be really serious in order to make this a success!

Knowing is Not Enough

This morning as I was going through my blog subscriptions, I came across this post from Edith Yeung. Edith in a thirtysome year woman, living in San Francisco, who decided to give up her full time six figure income to pursue her passions - real estate, public speaking, and entrepreneurship.

I really enjoyed the quote below from Anthony Robbins.

"You see, in life, lots of people know what to do, but few people actually do what they know. Knowing is not enough! You must take action."

Two days ago I was struggling to put my thoughts related to this topic down on paper. I have read so much and gained so much knowledge over the years, but most of it is wasted since I never took action and then forgotten since it's hard for me to remember things that I'm not actively doing.

One thing I always appreciated about David Bach is that he asked you to do something in the next 48 hours related to your goal. If your goal was to buy a vacation home, you could start doing research on the area you want to buy in. The next step you took towards your goal didn't need to be big, but you just needed to do something.

So for my three goals, I am planning on showing monthly progress towards them on this blog on what I'm doing. I'm going to try to do something related to achieving these goals DAILY. I would post updates to my progress even more frequently, but I don't want to bore you guys! Here's my progress so far:

1. Earn at least $2,000 from online endeavors
In 2008, I have begun blogging and reading about how to improve my blog. I have also completed one online survey, earning me $5.

2. Get to $25,000 in my “early retirement” account.
I realized that this is going to be a bit harder than I thought. When I made this goal, I thought I had about $10K in this account. After actually looking at the account, the total is much closer to $9K. Darn stock market! I don't think I mentioned it before, but all of the money earned from online endeavors is going to this account, as well as a portion of my paycheck, any bonuses, etc.

3. Run the Nike’s Women’s Half Marathon.
My husband and I went running on New Years Day. I warmed up for 1/2 mile and ran 2 miles. We're planning on going running again today.

Hope your goals are going well in the first week of 2008!

My Goals for 2008

One problem I’ve had in the past is not clearly defining goals. Or some of my clearly defined goals are too easy for me to reach with my ability to automate things. For 2008, I have come up with 3 goals that will be a stretch for me.

1. Earn at least $2,000 from my online endeavors. This is mostly going to be from this blog (to date, I haven’t earned anything, but that’s partially due to laziness on my part since I was offered one advertising deal that I never closed) and selling stuff on eBay and Craigslist.
2. Get to $25,000 in my “early retirement” account. Right now I have just a bit under $10,000. I plan to discuss this in further detail in the future.
3. Run the Nike’s Women’s Half Marathon.

All three of these goals will challenge me. #3 will be especially difficult for me since I’m not an athletic person by nature. When work gets really busy, exercise is the first thing to get cut out of my schedule.

I plan on creating some sort of pictorial guidance on this blog showing my progress towards these goals, so please stay tuned for more.

This year I decided to only focus on a few goals. I didn't have too many last year (I think it was 5), but it was difficult for me to have goals in so many different areas (financial, personal, exercise, spiritual), so this year I'm trying to keep it simple.

Five Things I Want to Do to Save Money or Improve My Life

Reading posts from others inspires me to make changes to my own life. Here are some strategies I want to implement.

1. Stop drinking bottled water

2. Start shopping at thrift stores for specific items like maternity clothes

3. Buy a side of beef

4. Install a clothesline

5. Plant some tomatoes