Happy October!
September turned into a networking and coaching month. Met a few new contacts that I’ve started working with to help create financial calculations and build budgets and savings and it’s been amazing! I wish I would have started this a long time ago. This is probably not news to you but it was news to me; using your skills and talents to help people can be really rewarding. Find people with strengths in your areas of weakness to build you up and help people with weakness in your areas of strength.
There are only about 90 days left until 2019. So let’s get to work.
2018 Financial Goals:
Goal #1 Make an extra $15,001 to remain the primary wage earner. New monthly record! Made an extra $531.20 of side income in September. The biggest chunk of this came from selling a stock for a $237 profit. I’ve been holding on to some of my picks for a while and expect to sell several more stocks over the next few months, market willing. The farmers market is done for the season so I’ll be working on replacing that income.
Goal #2 Save 50% of our gross household income from March through December. In September we saved 64.61% 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%
August 68.01%
September 64.61%
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 Traditional IRAs.
Goal #4 Improve our asset allocation. Traditionally, this term “asset allocation” is used to define the mix of investments in a portfolio (example: 90% stocks, 10% bonds) but I’m using it here to describe the percent of assets that are generating income (401Ks, CDs, taxable brokerage accounts, etc) compared to assets that do not produce income (vehicles, cash and our house).
Starting asset allocation:
17% Income producing assets
83% Non-Income producing assets
Current asset allocation:
28.50% Income producing assets
71.50% Non-Income producing assets
Goal asset allocation by 12/31/18:
30% Income producing assets
70% Non-Income producing assets
We are only 1.5% away from accomplishing this goal! I don’t think we will hit it in October but by the end of November we should hit it for sure. The purpose behind this goal is to make sure that we are using assets to build wealth instead of buying assets that do little or nothing for our portfolio. For example, I want to make sure we don’t have too much money “invested” in our cars since cars go down in value rapidly (deprecation) and don’t produce any income (well ours don’t anyway). I am still learning and getting comfortable with investing so it takes a while to get money invested and tends to build up our cash reserve which is just sitting in a savings account, not earning much interest.
Goal #5 Spend 100 hours providing financial coaching. Hit the 60 hour mark! I have been including time spent preparing for client meetings.
Goal #6 Set financial boundaries and communicate them to family members. I didn’t make any progress on this goal in August or September. I need to have a more in depth talk with one of my brothers that I have been dreading and procrastinating on all year. Perhaps October will be the month to slog through this quagmire.
Goal #7 Monthly net worth updates. Still crushing this goal by updating our net worth tracker on almost a daily basis.
Cheers to October!