You know how to take the [rental car] reservation, you just don’t know how to hold the reservation and that’s really the most important part of the reservation, the holding. Anybody can just take them. – Jerry Seinfeld
Goals are a little bit like rental car reservations. Making goals is extremely easy. It’s achieving them that requires work. With that in mind, allow me to look back my goals for the last year and see how I did. I give myself grades depending on how well I’ve done.
Max out both mine and my wife’s retirement plans – Grade: B – I failed in this goal, but only because I resigned from my day job. I ended up contributing over $12,000 to my 401k before that happened. My wife (we got married during the year) has maxed out her accounts. I have to focus on my Roth IRA, but we have until tax day in April to do so. It will be a challenge with my limited income, but one I look forward to.
Look into educational plans for my nephew – Grade: A – My search lead me to start a 529 Plan in Ohio Choosing a 529 Plan. My nephew now has $450 dollars from us waiting for him.
Bring in $300 in alternative income – Grade: A+++ – I had no idea that people would be willing to pay money for sponsorship on Lazy Man and Money. At the time I made this goal, I had 10,000 total visitors to Lazy Man and Money in the first 7 months. This month alone, I’m on pace to have 35,000 visitors. I couldn’t anticipate that kind of growth. I had a stretch goal of $1000/mo. and it looking like I’ll pass that by 80% with over $1800/mo. this month and last.
Start a new blog on another entirely different topic – Grade C- – Have you visited Lazy Man and Health? That blog isn’t as highly trafficked as I had hoped. I haven’t been writing the amount of content or doing the marketing/networking that I should be.
Finish development on my most recent business idea – Grade F- – This has been a total failure. I had hoped to start an online game where you play the role of the general manager of a baseball team. The idea was to trade and draft players while you build a championship team. This isn’t a new idea, other games like this exist, but I had a couple of twists and I thought I could compete on price. This idea isn’t dead, but I will try to build this game in such a way that I learn new technologies such as Ruby on Rails. This will give me a valuable skill if I decided that I need to re-enter the workforce.
Overall, I feel like I did a fine job in 2007. I fell short in some areas, but most of those were related to spending more time trying to make this website a success. That was a trade that I was very comfortable with. In the next couple of days, I’ll create some new goals for 2008.
I would say you’ve done a very nice job overall. Life throws curve balls sometimes, and there is not much you can do but slap the ball into the opposite field and hope it drops for a base hit. I say it looks like you slapped a double into the gap. A solid at bat if I ever saw one.
I’m curious about the game. What unique twists would yours have?
Congrats on meeting most of your goals (B’s aren’t that bad!) — I was wondering how you went about getting sponsorships for your blog. I don’t get quite as many readers as you (but maybe I can change that over the next year). I already had one offer for a sponsorship and I just agreed to the $ that was offered to me to put that ad on my page. Very cool. But I’d like to see if I can up my income from my blog. Any suggestions on how to get started with that? Thanks!
Writer’s Coin: I gave you answers in a private e-mail.
Her Every Cent Counts: I also gave you answers in a private e-mail.
I would say you and your wife did pretty well!