Happy mid-year!
Before I go through each of my 2018 goals and share status updates I just want to take a moment to celebrate having made it past February. I’ve mentioned before how most people have given up on their resolutions and annual goals by the time February rolls around. I’m still thinking about these goals daily and I hope you are still engaged with yours too!
2018 Financial Goals:
Goal #1 Make an extra $15,001 to remain the primary wage earner. Over the last few months I’ve held a yard sale, had a booth at our weekly farmers market, invested in individual stocks, and leveraged cash back apps to earn an extra $1,746 of side income! Now, I’m well behind where I should be in order to hit this goal by year end (should be at $6,819) but I’ve increased monthly side hustle income from about $40 per month to averaging $291 per month so I’m very happy with this result. I am working on growing these existing sources and trying other ideas to continually improve this side income.
Goal #2 Save 50% of our gross household income from March through December. I’m glad to report that we have been knocking this goal out of the park. I calculate this by dividing the amount saved each month by our total gross income to come up with the following saving rate percentages:
March 58.97%
April 64.94%
May 53.90%
June 74.28%!!!!!
June was a 3 pay period month for me so that is why the rate is so high. I haven’t always tracked our savings rate, but I suspect this is about as high as it has ever been. We are averaging 63.02% per month but have some travel planned in November and December so I do anticipate ending the year at the 50% average savings rate.
Goal #3 Max out everything. We set our percentages at the beginning of the year so we are on track to max out our 401Ks, 1 HSA and our IRAs.
Goal #4 Improve our asset allocation.
Starting asset allocation:
17% Income producing assets
83% Non-Income producing assets
Current asset allocation:
21% Income producing assets
79% Non-Income producing assets
Goal asset allocation by 12/31/18:
30% Income producing assets
70% Non-Income producing assets
We still have a ways to go on this asset allocation goal. There is a cash account that we are planning to close and invest which would bring us almost to the goal but we have been procrastinating going to the bank to get that done. I hadn’t thought about this at the beginning of the year, but since the market where we live is appreciating a lot, and since our home is our largest “non-income producing asset”, it is making it harder to improve the ratio to invested assets. Not to complain, I will gladly take the appreciation, but it might make it harder to achieve this goal.
Goal #5 Spend 100 hours providing financial coaching. After 17 hours of coaching, I’m behind the 50 hours that I should be by July. I’m not worried about this goal since I’m just starting to get coaching hours at the charity I signed up for, and I expect more coaching opportunities going forward.
Goal #6 Set financial boundaries and communicate them to family members. I’ve had a preliminary discussion with each of my brothers about my feelings towards financial dependence and think I’m making some progress here. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to articulate my boundaries. This goal isn’t as measurable as the other goals I set but it is important to me so I didn’t want to leave it off the list.
Goal #7 Monthly net worth updates. I have been diligently tracking our net worth since March and I love it! I’m a very detail oriented person so it has been really fun to get to see the big picture and track our actual progress. We are getting very close to a big net worth milestone so I have actually been updating our net worth tracker weekly. Yeah, what a nerd.
Cheers to the next 6 months!