Happy August!
I made a lot of progress in July towards getting my life together. We decluttered, we organized, we streamlined and we cleaned and it was magnificent! I predict that someday in the future my house is going to be so clean and organized that we won’t even know what to do with it.
But enough about my house organization goals and onto the financial goals.
2018 Financial Goals:
Goal #1 Make an extra $15,001 to remain the primary wage earner. This month, the $229 that I made at the farmers market was the bulk of the $347.49 of side-income earned. Bought a few new stocks this month but didn’t sell any. Planning to do another garage sale in August and hoping to get around to Craigslisting a few items.
Goal #2 Save 50% of our gross household income from March through December. In July we saved 58.64% of our pre-tax income. I read recently that a lot of people calculate their savings rate based on their take home pay. This is alright since taxes are likely a small portion of their expenses but since taxes are our biggest expense I include them in our spending total.
Here are our savings rates by month:
March 58.97%
April 64.94%
May 53.90%
June 74.28%
July 58.64%
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:
22% Income producing assets
78% Non-Income producing assets
Goal asset allocation by 12/31/18:
30% Income producing assets
70% Non-Income producing assets
Got a little closer this month to the goal allocation. We finally closed our old farm checking account that we had been meaning to close for about a year but had been procrastinating. In August, we are going to work on investing that cash which will increase our Income producing asset amount.
Goal #5 Spend 100 hours providing financial coaching. Did quite a bit of coaching in July, to the tune of 13 hours which almost doubled my year-to-date total.
Goal #6 Set financial boundaries and communicate them to family members. I made a financial goal setting spreadsheet and a net worth tracker for one of my brothers this month. Although I felt the temptation to follow up and encourage him to fill it out, I restrained myself and did not mention the spreadsheets again after the initial send. It was a mental battle on a few days to convince myself not to “gently encourage” him to use them but I’m winning this war for now. My current strategy: share a bit and if they ask for additional information then I can provide it, but if not I need to let it go.
Goal #7 Monthly net worth updates. The Zillow Zestimate for our house dropped several thousand dollars this month so our net worth didn’t come out as high as expected. We also had some investments that gave up some gains so although we did increase our net worth this month, it was a smaller increase.
Cheers to August!