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.

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!