Goals Archives - Lazy Man and Money

Lazy Man Goals 2021 Final

January 3, 2022 by Lazy Man 4 Comments

This is my fifth and final goal update for 2021. I had planned to do eight spacing them roughly six weeks apart, but I fell behind. I suppose one of my goals for 2022 will be for me to be more consistent in writing goal updates.

For the last update, my wife had just started her monthly deployment before Christmas. At that time, I was extremely productive, but that only lasted a couple of weeks. The last two weeks were an exercise in treading water. That quickly transitioned into a Christmas blitz. My wife got home on the 18th and we did all the decorating and wrapping in a couple of days. It’s too stressful to fit a month’s worth of Christmas into a week.

We’re having a construction crew do house renovations at the same time. It was unavoidable and we had been trying to get them for months. We still had some work to do before they could get started. There’s more on this below.

I have been keeping up with my passive income reports which includes a little slice of our lives (pictures and things we did) over the last month. I add that personal stuff in for the voyeurs out there – all math and no personality is boring. This goal update is a mix between the two, some money/professional goals as well as family goals.

For 2021, I made some goals to start the year like I do every year. However, year after year, I fail to make any consistent progress on my goals. I know I always plan to do too much. I also fail to review my progress and make corrections. I’m a little better at reviewing my progress, but as I noted in the beginning, it needs improvement.

Final 2021 Goal Update

Before we get started here’s my spreadsheet. It’ll be helpful to follow along. If you have ideas on how this system could be better I’d love to hear them in the comments.

In January everyone was saying that we shouldn’t make goals for 2021. No one knew what to expect after 2020. We didn’t know when or if we’d be eligible for vaccines. I made goals anyway. If I failed, I had a built-in excuse. It was good to have something non-COVID to focus on.

Let’s get to those 2021 goals:

Money Goals

Make $60,000 – I’ve made just over $75,000 this year. That’s a big improvement over the $51K I made in 2020. It looks like I set a poor goal, but I had no idea when dog sitting was coming back… and I didn’t expect to have more business demand than I could handle.

We’ll see how 2022 goes with dog sitting. Things could be great… after June 1, I made 85% of my money. Things could be bad, Omicron (or the Greek letter after that) could disrupt people’s travel again.

Final Grade: A+

Wife Retirement Savings – We were hoping to put aside $35,000 this year. The dog sitting money has been helping to cover a lot of the bills in the second half of the year. She’s put more money away. We pausing at $35,000 this year which gives us a total of $60,000 for retirement.

There are two main reasons to pause this goal:

1. It looks like my wife won’t be retiring after all. She’s starting a different job that she worked at as part of her old job. She likes this work a lot more and is excited about it.

2. One of the family goals below is expensive and the bills are just coming in now. We’ll need a month to figure out where we are.

With the timeline of my wife’s retirement changed, we’ll have to think about how to handle this money. I think my wife loves the idea of it being cash in the bank. I’d like to see it grow. Most of our money is in retirement funds and real estate that are difficult to access. If all goes well, maybe additional contributions through 2022 could turn this $60,000 into $100,000.

Final Grade: A+

Business Goals

Content Audit/Article Refresh – I have a lot of articles from around 2006 and 2007 that are very short, filled with a dozen of spelling/grammatical errors, and not very well put together. My goal at the beginning of the year was to fix them up and make them relevant for today, if possible. I had hoped to do 40 articles, about one each week, but I only got 8 done. The dog sitting became more of a full-time job than I expected.

I still want to do this, but I think I’ll lower the goal a lot if I renew it for 2022. I have some other things that I want to accomplish.

Final Grade: F

7,000 Twitter Followers – I manage to lose a few Twitter followers every update. I got a few tips on what I would need to do, but, it was more involved than I thought. Maybe I can try again next year.

Final Grade: F

Minor Website Design – I made no progress on this one. Editing the design of my website is such a chore now. The code is glued together from many different places and even finding small parts to edit has been a treasure hunt.

Final Grade: F

Articles for KidWealth.com – This is a new website that I was looking to launch in 2021. I am pushing it to launch in January 2022. I hope to have the first of the articles live by the time you read this. That’s one reason why you’ve seen more articles about parenting and teaching kids money here. I’ll repost some of the articles there.

In addition to the articles here, I have parts of about 35 articles, which I’m going to count as about 20 articles completed. I can’t give myself a great grade though because I had expected to launch last May.

Final Grade: C

Ironically, none of the new business goals were focused on dog sitting, which is where I saw tremendous business growth. It looks like I failed spectacularly, but it was one of my more successful years. A lot of unexpected things can happen in a year.

Personal

Lose Weight – For most of the year, I made little progress on this. I’m active, but I can’t seem to make (and keep) the drastic lifestyle changes that would be necessary to lose 15 pounds. I knew this would be difficult. I feel like it would have to be my full-time job now.

When my wife was away, I had been executing a some of my Lazy Man Extreme Diet. I lost about 6 pounds. However, the stress of cramming Christmas into a week with home renovations going on was too much. There were a lot of holiday meals on top of that. I’m going to give myself a D because I did lose some weight for a while. I’d rather focus on where things were going for the first two weeks of December than the last two weeks of December.

Final Grade: D

Bucket List/Dream Board – I’ve made no progress on this since around the beginning of the year. I’m having a lot of fun with the kids and teaching them new stuff. I don’t need to swim with dolphins right now if the rest of the family stuff is going well.

Final Grade: D

Professional Skills – I had made a list of blogging professional skills, but I’ve accomplished none of them. However, I’ve certainly made great progress when it comes to my dog sitting business. I’m going to count it. I’m also better at working with people, which is a skill that has atrophied a lot when I transitioned to blogging online.

Next year, I’m going to have to do a lot more in the blogging skills like becoming good with Canva to make better pictures. I want to learn Tailwind and get good at marketing on Pinterest. I’m also going to hire a social media person for a few hours a week. I may use that to outsource some blogging skills that I haven’t had the time to learn yet.

Family

Travel to Europe – COVID eliminated the travel plans to Europe.

We pivoted and went to Hawaii trip in April. We were able to get tested and fly over many states that would have forced us to quarantine. The prices were amazing too. It’s not clear when we’ll be back to Hawaii. It’s a long flight (and usually expensive) from the east coast.

In June we went to Block Island, which was a local staycation. The rooms were expensive, but it’s great to get away from technology and hike around in nature. It has a very low COVID risk since the population is small and most of the things to do are outside.

In July, just before Delta got bad, we went to Hershey Park and the Cartoon Network Hotel (it’s a motel) in Lancaster, PA.

We tried to go to the Von Trapp Family Lodge in December, but we had to cancel. There was no practical way to fit it in with the contractors working on the house. It would have taken up 4 of our precious 7 days to prepare for Christmas.

Considering the circumstances, I’m giving us an A+ for travel. In the end, we did almost all the trips that we’d normally do in a non-COVID year. The difference is that we’d go to our Aruba timeshare instead of Hawaii. I don’t think anyone has shed a tear substituting Hawaii for Aruba.

Final Grade: A+

Finish the Basement – Contractors are here and started. They needed the electrician to do his work and he ghosted us for a few days. However, that work is looking good and the contracts should be back today and working the rest of this week to finish things up.

I’m marking it at 95% complete because most of our work is done. We just have to write some big checks. This goal was in direct competition with saving for my wife’s retirement. I think accomplishing both was perhaps the biggest “win” of the year.

Final Grade: A

Parenting

Kids YouTube Channel – I took a day and set up a YouTube Channel for them. It doesn’t normally take a day to set up a YouTube channel, but I bought a domain name and redirected it to the channel. I also filmed their first video. It’s pre-production trash with no script or planning, but it is a video posted live on the internet. I’m not going to share it here though.

It will be easier to make videos of some kind of quality when we’ve finished the basement and the kids have a place to film.

This is a serious “make a million” venture. The kids wanted to do it and I want to learn more about creating videoes. We’re all learning and having fun.

There’s one more thing with this. I had forgotten about this goal until the last update. Having it down in writing and knowing that I could complete it before the year was up helped me get it done.

Final Grade: A

Drone Flying – We only got a little drone flying in this year. The kids are into so many other things, it doesn’t make sense to push this. One kid got a hoverboard for his birthday and he used that for a while. That could have been drone time, but hoverboard is just as good. There’s nothing too special about why they should learn to fly a drone other than I think it would be a fun hobby.

I’ve got a DJI Mavic Mini for Christmas, so I expect to do more next year. It looks like it is for age 16+ and my kids aren’t going to get away with saying that their ages add up to 17.

Final Grade: D

Outdoor stuff (hours) – I needed to have a better metric on this one. Measuring in hours per year just doesn’t work. They need more outside time than less than one hour a week. They did get a lot of outside time most of the year, but over the last couple of months we’ve been inside more. It’s time to switch that up a bit.

I’m going to give myself a B. We got to the goal, but it wasn’t a great goal.

Final Grade: B

Computer Programming – The kids had some time with Tynker, but they thought it was a chore. I think if I set it up with the Minecraft course they’ll like it much more. Our older kid also a summer camp week with Lego WeDo which is was very good. It’s too bad that Lego discontinued it, which makes any remaining kits sky high. I was lucky to pick up a kit on eBay for a reasonable price. That older kid was able to work with my younger one at home.

It’s a good start, but I’m disappointed that it’s so difficult to find a way to teach children this important skill. There aren’t in-school or after-school classes.

Final Grade: B

Specialty Camps – We missed out on some camps because we were preparing to go to Hawaii (and going to Hawaii) and my wife deployed soon after. However, we got a couple of building camps, art camps, and cooking camps. This covers most of their special interests. My 9-year-old was the youngest in the cooking class and he loved being with all the older kids. Next year, my 8-year-old will be old enough to do cooking class and he’s interested in it.

It’s going to be time to set up camps for 2022 soon.

Final Grade: B

Final Thoughts

The Personal list needs a lot of work. Next year, I need to review all these goals more often so I can make corrections.

The Business area was mixed. I didn’t do what I expected to do(blogging), but I did really well in something else (dog sitting).

We also did well with our Money goals in 2022. That’s not including the huge gains of stock and real estate markets. The Family and Parenting stuff all went very well too.

Lazy Man Goal Update (November 2021)

November 23, 2021 by Lazy Man 1 Comment

I hoped to do eight updates of my goals – an update every 6 weeks. I’ve failed at that spectacularly. The first few updates took a long time to write, but I’m getting better at it and now it’s easier. This is the fourth and last one until next year when I have the data for a final round-up.

For a little life update, things have been busy here. My wife has deployed for a month and we’re almost through the first week of that. It’ll be a different kind of Thanksgiving this year We enjoy many military benefits, so all part of the deal we’ve agreed to. She should be back for Christmas. Many families aren’t that lucky.

I have been keeping up with my passive income reports which includes a little slice of our lives (pictures and things we did) over the last month. I add that personal stuff in for the voyeurs out there – the math can be boring. This goal update is a mix between the two, some money/professional goals as well as family goals.

November 2021 Goal Update

Before we get started here’s my spreadsheet. It’ll be helpful to follow along. If you have ideas on how this system could be better I’d love to hear them in the comments.

In January everyone was saying that we shouldn’t make goals for 2021. Everyone was hungover from 2020 and we didn’t know when anyone in our family would be eligible for vaccines or if there would be enough of them. I made goals anyway. I figured that it gave me a built-in excuse if I failed. I also wanted to have something else to focus on to help me feel like things are normal again.

Let’s get to the goals:

Money Goals

Make $60,000 – I’ve made $71,640.32 this year. At the start of the year, there was no dog sitting money due to COVID, and making $50,000 could have been a stretch. The $60,000 target looked like I’d have to start a new business. However, vaccines came and everyone, after getting pandemic dogs, abandoned them to catch up on travel. Dog sitting became the old hobby making $1000 a month that was now a new business making several thousand.

I expected a seasonal drop-off, but that hasn’t happened. We’ll see how long this lasts.

Wife Retirement Savings – We are hoping to put aside $35,000 this year. On the last update, we only had $15,000 and it didn’t look like this would happen. However, we’re now at $30,704. She’s been putting more of her paycheck away for savings as I’ve been able to pay for more things with the extra dog sitting money.

We’ve got a chance to complete this goal, but we have big expenses coming up. I’ll have more to say about that in the vacation and basement finishing sections.

Business Goals

Content Audit/Article Refresh – I have a lot of articles from around 2006 and 2007 that are very short, filled with a dozen of spelling/grammatical errors, and not very well put together. My thought at the beginning of the year was to fix them up and make them relevant for today, if possible. I had hoped to do 40 articles, about once a week, but I only got 8 done. I have too much dog sitting work to devote time to this right now.

7,000 Twitter Followers – I manage to lose a few Twitter followers every update. I got a few tips on what I would need to do, but, it was more involved than I thought. May I can try again next year.

Articles for KidWealth.com – This is a new website that I was looking to launch this year. However, it looks like I might launch in January. That’s one reason why you’ve seen more articles about parenting and teaching kids money here.

I’ve outlined around 40 articles and I’ve been working on getting them ready. I’ve gotten around 15 close to ready. I think (hope?) this is enough to launch with. I don’t know how much more writing I’m going to get done why my wife is deployed. We have only about one week of the year left when she’s around and it isn’t a holiday or travel for us.

While on the topic of kids and money, MoneyTime has a 50% off Black Friday promotion. That’s an affiliate link, so I’ll make a little money, but you’ll still save a lot. Here’s my MoneyTime review, so you can decide if it’s right for you.

Personal

Lose Weight – When is losing weight easy? I can’t seem to make progress on this one. I’ve been executing a lot of my Lazy Man diet over the last week with my wife away. I started to make a little progress in the first few days, but it has reversed since. It’s still early, so we’ll see how it goes over the next month.

Bucket List/Dream Board – I’ve made no progress on this. One of my goals was to meet the Vice President of the United States as I had a reasonable expectation that would happen. My wife is president of a military organization that generally meets the VP once a year and spouses are invited. However, they changed things up this year. Kamala was in France mending our relationship with them. My wife met with the President of the United States at the White House instead, but I couldn’t go.

This month I met a group of entrepreneurs that share business referrals and things like that. I’m going to join the group and it should help grow my dog sitting business to the next level.

Next year, I’m going to have to do a lot more in the blogging skills like becoming good with Canva to make better pictures. I want to learn Tailwind and get good at marketing on Pinterest. I may also hire a social media person for a few hours a week. If you are interested, contact me.

Family

Travel to Europe – Nope, not going to happen. My wife had big plans to do a Greek cruise this summer. That wasn’t realistic, so she pivoted and came up with the idea of our Hawaii trip in April. We were able to get tested and fly over many states that would have forced us to quarantine. We had a great time. In June we went to Block Island, which was a local staycation. Rooms are expensive, but it’s great to get away from technology and hike around in nature. In July, just before Delta got bad, we went to Hershey Park and the Cartoon Network Hotel (it’s a motel) in Lancaster, PA.

We were planning to go to Vermont to the Von Trapp Family Lodge in late December. It’s on my wife’s bucket list. It’s up in the air now because we have so little time after my wife is back before Christmas. It was still an amazing year of travel when you consider what the options available were.

Finish the Basement – We’ve got the contractors called and scheduled. They wanted to come in late December when we’d be in Vermont. That won’t work, so it’s another reason to cancel the trip.

I would have marked this as 100% done, but the contractors still have to do all their stuff.

Parenting

Kids YouTube Channel – I made no progress on this. It will be easier to do something when we’ve finished the basement and the kids have a place to film. Our third grader did win a competitive role in the 8th-grade school play, so maybe that’s a step forward. Our second grader had stage fright and didn’t want to try out, so maybe that’s a step backward. He is good in front of a camera though.

Drone Flying – We only got a little drone flying in. Maybe we’ll get some more this weekend since the kids have some time off from school.

Outdoor stuff (hours) – We spent a lot of time outdoor with the weather was good. The kids can still watch TV and play video games for hours, but we have enough other things to pry them away. It’s difficult because they seem to have activities all the time and I think they enjoy some quiet time.

Computer Programming – The kids had some time with Tynker, but they thought it was a chore. I think if I set it up with the Minecraft course they’ll like it much more. One kid also had a summer camp week with Lego WeDo, which was good.

I was looking into some kind of class and there’s nothing in Rhode Island. I reached out to Code Ninjas to inquire about starting a franchise in the state and they were fairly rude. Of course, I was probably not their ideal franchisee since I introduced myself as someone who could help them out. I also asked for more numbers than what they provided because I didn’t want to invest hundreds of thousands to buy myself a job.

Specialty Camps – We missed out on some camps because we were preparing to go to Hawaii (and going to Hawaii) and my wife deployed soon after. However, we got a couple of building camps, art camps, and cooking camps. This covers most of their special interests. My 8-year-old was the youngest in the cooking class and he loved being with all the older kids. Next year, my 7-year-old will be old enough to do cooking class too. It’s expensive, but it’s a good skill to learn, right?

Final Thoughts

While nothing is perfect here, I think there’s some steady progress being made. The Business section is empty, but the pivot to focus on the dog sitting has worked out well for us.

Lazy Man Goal Update (August 2021)

August 25, 2021 by Lazy Man 6 Comments

My plan this year was to do eight updates of my goals, spaced out every 6 weeks. I thought that doing it more often would keep me focused on the long-term plans instead of getting lost in the daily routine. The last update was in April – I’ve missed two updates and I’m a week late with this one. It’s been a struggle.

I have been keeping up with my passive income reports which includes a little slice of our lives (pictures and things we did) over the last month. I add that personal stuff in for the voyeurs out there, because the math can be boring. This goal update is a mix between the two, some money and professional as well as family goals.

With the failure to review progress and make corrections for four months now, let’s see how it’s going:

August 2021 Goal Update

Before we get started here’s my spreadsheet. It’ll be helpful to follow along. If you have ideas on how this system could be better I’d love to hear them in the comments.

I don’t think I made very good goals this year. They are all over the place. Some of them are boolean (we either went to Europe or we didn’t). Some of them are based on numbers and others are based on percentages. If I can take a “win” out of these goals, it’s that many, many people were screaming, “Don’t make goals for 2021!” When the year started we didn’t know when we’d be eligible for vaccines or if there would be enough of them. At the time, Delta sounded like more of a college sorority than something that would threaten to spin us back to square one.

Money Goals

Make $60,000 – I’ve made $48,266.97 so far and I’m on pace for almost $75,000. In April, I declared this an impossibility since my dog sitting income was close to zero due to COVID. However, vaccines, summer travel, and pandemic dogs have been amazing! I’ve been hustling and my wife calls me the Walter White of dog sitting (not sure if this is a good thing). Anyway, the dog-sitting income will probably drop down for the rest of the year. There’s always a seasonal drop-off when the kids go back to school, but add in the Delta variant and the dog sitting income will start trending down.

Wife Retirement Savings – My wife’s retirement fund is $15,000 bigger this year, but we are still a little behind what I had hoped on this one. We’ve had a few months where we spent more money than we usually do. The travel section below covers most of it.

Business Goals

Content Audit/Article Refresh – I’ve completed 8 of the 40 articles that I hope for this year. I have a lot of articles from around 2006 and 2007 that are very short, filled with a dozen of spelling/grammatical errors, and not very well put together. I haven’t been able to keep up with this over the last four months. The scheduling of 40-50 dogs a month is a full-time job. It’s not so much the dogs as it managing the owners. This goal will most likely get pushed to whatever seasonal downtime we have coming up.

7,000 Twitter Followers – I manage to lose a few Twitter followers every update. I’m going to need some tips or something. It may help to have some big media coverage.

Minor Website Design – I made no progress on this one. I think the only way to move forward on this one is to put on a short-term to-do list, rather than this mid-long term one. Unfortunately, that short-term list is full right now.

Article for New Website – Five. I’ve gotten a couple more articles written for the new website I’m planning. This is not great progress. As with the content audit above, I’ll have to put more of my time towards blogging instead of dog sitting.

Personal

Lose Weight – I’ve lost 4 pounds of the 15 that is part of my goal. I’ve made some gains this year and then lost them while traveling and getting out of my routine. This is a long-term average throughout the year as measured by my Fitbit scale. It’s great to see the line moving in the right direction even if I had hoped to have more progress.

Bucket List/Dream Board – I’m still where I was in April with this one. That’s about 65% done with creating something. As for the 35% that I have left with this, I want to create a dream board to make it more visual. When these things sit in a spreadsheet on a hard drive, they just don’t get done. As far as checking off items on the Bucket List, my wife booked tickets for our flight to D.C. in November. There’s a military dinner where it is tradition to meet the Vice President and there’s a rumor that the President himself may be there this year.

Professional Skills – 20% done. I had made a list of blogging professional skills, but I’ve accomplished none of them. However, I’ve certainly made great progress when it comes to my dog relationship skills. I’m going to count it. I’m also better at working with people, which is a skill that has atrophied a lot when I transitioned to blogging.

Family

Travel to Europe – Nope. My wife had big plans to do a Greek cruise this summer. That wasn’t realistic, so she pivoted and came up with the idea of our Hawaii trip in April. We were able to get tested and fly over many states that would have forced us to quarantine. We had a great time. In June we went to Block Island, which is a local staycation. Rooms are expensive, but it’s great to get away from technology and hike around in nature. In July, just before Delta got bad, we went to Hershey Park and the Cartoon Network Hotel (it’s a motel) in Lancaster, PA. With Delta as bad as it is now and knowing that even though I’m vaccinated, I can get my kids sick, I treasure these trips more.

Remember above when I explained that we didn’t make as much progress on saving my wife’s retirement goals? This was one of the main reasons why. We have no regrets – in fact, my wife planned all these trips and the spending that went along with them.

Finish the Basement – We’ve got half of our basement cleared out as of a few days ago. We just need to make a call and get the contractors scheduled. We got pricing several months ago, but we got busy and didn’t have the basement where it needs to be. We’re there now, so hopefully, they can get started. The plan, for now, is to do half the basement and see how that room serves us. The other half is being used for storage for now.

Parenting

YouTube Channel – I bought a green screen. That’s all the progress I’ve made on this. I think I just need to point the camera and get the kids posting content no matter how unprofessional it is. It’s not like we have a plan to make millions. I’m just hoping they get some experience and we get a few laughs along the way.

Drone Flying – We went drone flying once since the last report. My youngest (7-year-old) got to be quite good with it. The drone they are using is about $25, so it lacks features that help with flying. I have a $75 drone that I got on an Amazon Prime Day that we can upgrade too soon. If they can fly these terrible drones well, they should be great with the expensive ones, right?

Outdoor stuff (hours) – I originally had 40 hours outside as a very minimum goal because the kids rarely do much outside. However, when we were in Hawaii we were outside almost all the time. This summer the kids have had camps (see below). The weekends have been tougher to get out because of the dog sitting, but we still managed to get some activities in. I got my first surfing lesson in. It didn’t go great, so I’ll have to practice a lot more, but it was a lot more physical work than I thought.

Computer Programming – In April the kids were reading Captain Underpants and making comic books and I thought this was a good enough learning activity. In the last week, the kids have had some time off of camps, so I got them started on Tynker.com’s computer programming courses. In one of the camps, one of the kids had some computer programming with Lego WeDo. If that’s all we get done this year, I’ll consider this completed.

Specialty Camps – We missed out on some camps because we were preparing to go to Hawaii (and going to Hawaii) and my wife deployed soon after. However, we got a couple of building camps, art camps, and cooking camps. This covers most of their special interests. My 8-year-old was the youngest in the cooking class and he loved being with all the older kids. Next year, my 7-year-old will be old enough to do cooking class too. It’s expensive, but it’s a good skill to learn, right?

Final Thoughts

Back in April, I wrote: “Overall, I’m not feeling like I’ve made much progress, but there are pockets of progress. Unfortunately, the next update probably won’t have more progress. My wife is deployed getting the vaccine in peoples’ arms, so I’m trying to make this time extra fun for the kids.”

The progress was so bad before that I couldn’t put out an update. However, as you can see, things have turned around significantly. I should be able to make (or come close) to everything but the blogging goals this year. Even those have a chance in the next few months. Whatever gaps I have in those business goals should be filled by the ones I’ve added with the dog sitting skills.

Lazy Man Goal Update (April 2021)

April 13, 2021 by Lazy Man Leave a Comment

I usually don’t do two personal updates in a row, but that’s the way the editorial calendar ~~bounces~~, ~~crumbles~~, flows, I guess. On Friday, I published my March Passive Income report. I really like how that update keeps me focused on passive (or passive-ish) income and gives me a chance to share with you a slice of life (This is usually a bunch of pictures of kids and things that we did).

That update doesn’t cover mid or long-term goals. I made some goals to start the year like I do every year. However, year after year, I fail to make any consistent progress on my goals. I know I always plan to do too much. I also know that I forget to put the time and effort into the goals given the short-term life errands.

My hope is that doing this every month and a half will have me moving in the right direction. If nothing else, these goals get on my radar around 8 years a year.

April 2021 Goal Update

Before we get started here’s my spreadsheet. It’ll be helpful to follow along. If you have ideas on how this system could be better I’d love to hear them in the comments.

Is it possible to make “making good goals” a goal? If so, that is one of the things I’m hoping to get out of 2021. My goals are all over the place. Some of them are boolean (you either went to Europe or you didn’t). Some of them based on numbers. Some of those numbers are very strange because we already had some progress. My hope is that the act of working through this will help me improve and making the goals themselves and making them make sense.

Money Goals

Make $60,000 – I have $13,534.59 so far and I’m on pace for a little under $50,000. This is an aggressive goal and I wasn’t sure that I could do it with no dog sitting income (due to no travel due to COVID). However, people are starting to travel more, so I might be able to get closer to this. Realistically, the best way for me to get there is to come up with an additional source of income. I’m stretched thin in some places already, so it could be tough.

Wife Retirement Savings – My wife’s retirement fund is $5,000 bigger this year, but we are still behind the pace on this one. We might be able to get a little closer, but while my wife is deployed, we aren’t shifting money around too much. In March we spent a lot more money than we usually do. I’ll have more to write about that in the Family Goals section below.

Business Goals

Content Audit/Article Refresh – I’ve completed 8 of the 40 articles that I hope for this year. I have a lot of articles from around 2006 and 2007 that are very short, filled with a dozen of spelling/grammatical errors, and not very well put together. One of my goals this year is to take 40 of them, a little less than one a week, and update/refresh them as something new and useful for readers.

7,000 Twitter Followers – I lost 11 Twitter followers and now have 6634. It doesn’t seem like being more active on Twitter gets me more followers. It feels like this number only moves a fraction of a percent in either direction.

Article for New Website – Zero. I didn’t write anything for the new website. I have been pushing back the launch of this for months and months now. My best hope in moving forward with this is that I schedule a solid hour or two every day without interruptions. I think we need vaccines to allow the library to open full-time for that to happen.

Personal

Lose Weight – I’ve lost about a pound of the 15 that is part of my goal. It seems like losing weight is always the toughest goal for everyone. I’m eating better and getting out more with the better weather. However, a weekend at a Bed and Breakfast with the wife meant eating out all the time. I skipped lunch and still gained weight. A March trip to Hawaii meant many plate lunches and that set me back. I’m optimistic that I can make gains in the next month and a half.

Bucket List/Dream Board – I’d say I’m 65% done with this one. I have a list of around 20 items that I gathered from searching around other people’s bucket lists. I was even able to cross one-off. My 7-year-old wanted to swim with sea turtles and I added that to mine. Well, the weather didn’t cooperate when we got out to sea and the captain didn’t feel it was safe enough to swim with them, but we saw a few close-up from the boat. He’s counting it, so I’m counting. As for the 35% that I have left with this, I want to create a dream board to make it more visual. When these things sit in a spreadsheet on a hard drive, they just don’t get done.

Professional Skills – Zero. I had a list of things that I’d like to learn for blogging, but also included a couple of non-blogging things. I don’t think I made any progress on any of them. I think I’m going to have to make this more specific for 2022.

Family

Travel to Europe – Nope. My wife had big plans to do a Greek cruise this summer. That wasn’t realistic, so she pivoted and came up with the idea of our Hawaii trip. We were able to get tested and fly over many states that would have forced us to quarantine. We had a great time. Remember above when I explained that we didn’t make much progress on our money goals, this was one of the main reasons why. We have no regrets.

Finish the Basement – We made a little more progress by removing an old water heater and a boiler. I saw someone with random Dollar Store sticker numbers on the side of a truck of someone who hauls it all away and sells it for scrap metal. I guess scrap metal prices are good these days and these were heavy items. The guy was a unique character, perhaps one of the most “unique” I’ve met. I won’t share them on this blog, but ask me in person some time and we can talk about it over a beer.

Parenting

YouTube Channel – I’m not sure if we made any progress on this. I got a book from the library about making movies. It was very high level and the 8-year-old read it but said it was boring. I don’t think he enjoys planning, creating a script, etc. We may just point the camera and shoot and see what happens. Any practice is good practice, right?

Drone Flying – We’re just getting around to drone flying weather, so maybe we’ll start this over the next month or two. Since my kids are very young, we have a very cheap (~$25), basic drone. If they get good with that, I have a more advanced one (~$75) that features a camera. We’ll just work our way up and see if it’s something they enjoying doing.

Computer Programming – I didn’t make any progress in teaching the kids this, but the 8-year-old has picked up Scratch at school and played with it at home a couple of times. This is another area where I got a book from the library, but for now, Captain Underpants and Dog Man have the kids’ extra-reading interests. I’m not going to push it, but just leave it around and see if they pick it up.

Specialty Camps – We’re half-done picking camps. There aren’t a lot of options because of COVID and space filled up quickly. I think we lost out on some as we were in Hawaii (and preparing for Hawaii) when all the camps opened. My wife caught up with her work only to get deployed soon after.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I’m not feeling like I’ve made much progress, but there are pockets of progress. Unfortunately, the next update probably won’t have more progress. My wife is deployed getting vaccine in peoples’ arms, so I’m trying to make this time extra fun for the kids. I won’t be doing much to finish the basement or explaining how recursion works (programming). Our travel is planned for most of the year (annual trips to Block Island and Hershey Park). That leaves personal and business goals left to focus on. Hopefully, I can make some headway there.

Making SMART 2021 Goals

February 18, 2021 by Lazy Man 6 Comments

At the start of the year, I made some Goals and Resolutions for 2021. It was hastily thrown together. The kids were getting back into their school routine and one caught a cold. Because cold symptoms and COVID symptoms are the same, we had to pause life and get him a COVID test. Thankfully, it came back negative. (That’s what I had expected since he always gets a winter cold and we didn’t have any real COVID risk factors.)

Sometimes you simply have to move forward with something. Trying to be perfect is the enemy of being good enough.

However, with 1/8th of the year done, it is as good a time as any to go back and put some more detail into those goals. This time, I’m hoping to make them SMART goals, by applying the SMART metrics. I understand that it will take more than these metrics to make them realities. I need to make them habits and stay properly motivated on them. Finally, I’ll need a little luck. In 2020 few people saw COVID derailing their year’s goals, but stuff like that happens. Usually, it happens more at the individual level than the global level.

Before I get to all the goals here’s what my goal spreadsheet looks like. I created the spreadsheet while I was writing this post. I was going to include it at the end, but it is more useful to have the visual at the beginning.

If I do all that and I fail to meet my goals, I can take solace in this Michael Jordan quote:

I can accept failure. Everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying.

Money Goals

Make $60K of income

Last year I wanted to make $75,000 in income. COVID had other plans. I came in at around $50,000, but each month is trending worse and worse. I will need to turn things around just to make the $50,000 again, so $60K is a stretch.

I need to focus more on providing valuable services to people and working within the windows of childcare that I have. This is going to be a challenge, but that’s precisely the point.

Specific: $60,000 income. Check.
Measurable: I have a spreadsheet where I keep track of income and review it a few times a month. Check.
Attainable: Maybe. Currently, it relies on too many external forces that I don’t control.
Relevant: Maybe. My drive to earn $60K vs. $50K just isn’t great. I’ve always been more about quality of life.
Time-bound: Deadline is December 31, 2021. Check.

Save Money for Wife’s Retirement

This is complicated and worth a separate article all by itself.

We’re trying to save $100K for my wife to feel comfortable with retiring. The hope is to do this in just a couple of years.

She will get a nice pension and I can usually make the aforementioned income. However, some of my income has been lost since COVID and I’m not sure it’s coming back. We also have a lot of short-term expenses with some 15-year mortgages in their final trimester and private school. The 100K would give us at least a two-year cushion where she wouldn’t have to think about working.

We are starting the year with it about 25% completed. If we combine other emergency funds and accounts we might be further along.

Specific: Nope. It’s vague on where we should be by the end of 2021. I’ll revise this to be $60,000, which is saving another $35,000 this year, leaving the final $40,000 for next year.
Measurable: Now, it’s measurable. In fact, we’ve set up an account for this and measuring monthly as part of our net worth review.
Attainable: Maybe. It’s a lot of money to save given our current income and expenses.
Relevant: It was very relevant until last week. We recently got some news that may change that, but we won’t know for some months. The 100K goal will need to happen at some point, the timeline may change though.
Time-bound: Deadline is December 31, 2021. Check.

Business

Content Audit

This task was to review my old articles and refresh them to make them relevant and useful. I have a lot of articles that I wrote from 2006-2010 that you probably haven’t read. Even if you have, I can add 10 more years of wisdom and some much-needed proofreading to them. Search engines also like articles being updated and relevant.

I’ve been trying to refresh a new article once a week, usually on a Friday. The idea is that you’ll usually get a new article on Monday and Wednesday with the refreshed article on Friday. Sometimes, if I only publish Monday and Thursday, I won’t be able to get this refresh article in. On a busy week, maybe Wednesday and Friday are both refreshed articles. We’ll have to see how this goes, but I’m trying to keep the refreshed articles as “bonus” content that I haven’t been doing for years. I’m putting down a goal of 40 articles. That’s a lot since it would be every week.

Specific: 40 articles. Check.
Measurable: I’ll include this on my goal spreadsheet. Check
Attainable: Reasonably. It’s not all-or-nothing, so partial credit applies.
Relevant: This should help other business goals as well as be more useful for readers, right?
Time-bound: Deadline is December 31, 2021. Check.

Social Media

I want to be a lot better on social media. I still spend most of my time on Twitter, but haven’t grown much from my 6,500 followers. I’d like to grow this number, but I’m realizing that I don’t know how to get more Twitter followers. I’ll put down 7,000 followers for lack of anything better. I think most people are comfortable with the people they follow now. I should have put more time into learning Pinterest.

Specific: Nope I fail this one. It’s not specific and I don’t know how to make it specific. Please help me with some comments at the bottom of this post.
Measurable: Nope.
Attainable: Perhaps not. You’d think going from 6600 to 7000 isn’t much, but it is very difficult.
Relevant: Social Media seems to be extremely relevant when your business is a blog. Check.
Time-bound: I don’t have a goal, but everything here is 12/31/2021. Check

Website Design

I have a few things that I need to add to Lazy Man and Money. There are some minor theme errors and my RSS feed is still managed by Feedburner which Google acquired in May 2007 and basically shut down in 2011. It’s probably not the best idea to rely on technology that’s been obsolete for 10 years.

Specific: I have a website to-do list. I have to define that a little more, but this becomes a goal list inside of a goal list.
Measurable: I can measure it once I finalize the to-do list.
Attainable: Yep, I control all the code on the website, so the point of failure is simply me.
Relevant: The website is the business. Check.
Time-bound: Deadline is December 31, 2021. Check.

Launch New Website

I had an idea for another blog, which is a passion of mine. It’s related to personal finance, so I’ll share it here when it’s ready. I want to do more than just another personal finance blog though. I want it to be a website where you do stuff not just read the latest post and move on. Unfortunately, creating the infrastructure for that stuff is not easy. I’ve been trying to feel out to other personal finance bloggers to see if they’d be interested in sharing it in some way, but that hasn’t gained traction. For now, it will just have to be a blog.

One problem is that managing two blogs is a lot of work. I can barely manage this one as well as I should. However, the other ideas is just too good to give up.

Specific: Launch a new blog. That’s vague, so let’s make it better. Launch with 25 articles already written.
Measurable: This feels like it is all or nothing, but there are a lot of steps. I’ve done a lot of it already.
Attainable: At this point, I could probably flip the switch tomorrow, but I want to do a bigger launch than that. Whether it’s manageable long-term is a tough question.
Relevant: I love the idea (which I’m purposely being vague about), so I’d say yes.
Time-bound: May 1, 2021.

Personal Goals

Lose Weight

I gained a “Pandemic 15” and got very close to a big number on the scale that I don’t want to reach. We’ve been doing a lot of cooking and comfort eating. My wife and I are challenging each other (her idea) to lose weight. We have a chart on the fridge where post our daily weigh-ins.

This worked for the first month, but we’ve both stopped updating it. I’m replacing it with a quick spreadsheet that I made for each week of the year. We’re going to put our average weekly weight from our Fitbit Aria into the chart. I’m hoping this will work better – and be more accurate since it is an average.

I’m going to try to lose those 15 pounds by following my extreme Lazy Man Diet. The diet is too extreme to stick to long-term, but I should be able to manage a majority of it four or five days a week a couple of times a month.

I’ll need to add more exercise than walking my dog… especially weight training and cardio.

Specific: Lose 15 pounds. Check.
Measurable: With my Fitbit scale and a spreadsheet, this is measurable.
Attainable: It certainly won’t be easy, but it’s possible.
Relevant: This is a little debatable. I usually have so many other things pulling me in different directions that I can’t put a full effort into this.
Time-bound: Deadline is December 31, 2021. Check.

Make a Bucket List

I need to come up with some things that I want to do and experience.

Many personal finance bloggers with money travel the world. I know that I don’t like the act of traveling. Being in a new place is good. Getting to the new place is bad. Everything about an airplane is designed to make you uncomfortable. That’s literally the plan with coach seating. Some may say that we splurge for the good seating, but the spending necessary for that creates great internal conflict for me. It doesn’t get any better when you are at the destination, because then I have to deal with things like limited internet access… or paying outrageous prices for convenience.

Recently, I’ve settled on the idea of having a fancy house. I don’t know where it would be or how we’d get it, but I like the idea of a hot tub, indoor pool, and at least 3 monkey butlers.

As part of this, I’ll explore making a dream board. That will get me to the dangerously close place of scrapbooking. Now I’m starting to understand why I always put this off.

Back in January, I added this item. It was the easiest item to make progress on. With a little Googling around, I came up with a list of 20 items. I’d still like to do more and make the dream board, but I’m going to say this is half done for now. A lot of the items are hard or impossible to complete during COVID, so working through the bucket list itself is going to be a task for another time.

Specific: Create Bucket list… done (for now). Dream board… on the to-do list.
Measurable: This isn’t very measurable, so I’ll estimate that it is 50% done.
Attainable: It doesn’t get more attainable than creating a list.
Relevant: This is very relevant. I’m getting near a point in my life where I need to start living life a little.
Time-bound: Deadline is December 31, 2021. Check.

Professional Training

I need to work on real skills this year. I have a problem with this since I don’t have a big block of time for deep learning. I’m basically putting out small fires all day, except for when I’m wasting time on social media or news sites. In short, I need to manage my time better and be more disciplined.

As for some of the skills I’d like to learn, I’ll go with Canva (for blogging), Pinterest, film making/editing, and AI. My degree in computational linguistics is over 20 years old now. I feel like I should be able to refresh those skills and see if there are good jobs involving computers and language processing nowadays. (Yes, this is sarcasm.)

Specific: This is one of those items that needs its own list or plan. This item, as it stands, isn’t specific.
Measurable: It’s not specific, so I can’t measure it.
Attainable: I can do a few of these items like learn Canva well and take a Pinterest course. Putting together the time is a whole other ballgame.
Relevant: As much as I want to do all these things, current commitments make these very difficult.
Time-bound: Deadline is December 31, 2021. Check.

Family Goals

Travel to Eurpoe

Remember back in the bucket list where I mentioned that I don’t like traveling? Well, my wife likes being in a new place more than the pain of traveling. Back in January, she was mapping out a 3-week trip to Greece, Germany, and Venice, Italy. The timing of this is very specific for this summer too because the Greek leg is a pharmacy cruise. It seems we might be able to manage it for around $10,000 through a combination of military discounts and points.

I didn’t think it was likely to happen back then and she’s come to terms that the pipe dream won’t happen in 2021. We’ll push this one to 2022.

Finish the Basement

Since last summer, I’ve had a goal of finishing our basement to create more room for the family. Having a buffer of the main floor between our kids would be extremely helpful even without a pandemic. There’s a lot of decluttering work to do before we can hire a work crew – we’ve been storing baby and kid stuff for 8 years now… and had a lot of stuff before that. I think we are about 60% through the clutter.

We had a company come do an estimate and it seems like we’ll be able to move forward with this. It’s still a couple of months away, but I’m optimistic about finishing this in 2021.

Specific: Complete finished basement.
Measurable: This is all-or-nothing, but there are some steps in between.
Attainable: We should be able to do this.
Relevant: It’s very relevant as we’ve found that COVID creates the need for a little more space.
Time-bound: Deadline is December 31, 2021. Check.

Parenting Goals

It’s hard to come up with plans for the kids. Their interests are always changing. The things we can do during COVID keep changing as well. We’ll have to play it by ear. That said, I think we can try a few things:

YouTube Channel

I’m not sure if a YouTube channel is right for a 7 and 8-year-old. I think it is worth a try… as long as we manage expectations. There are some useful skills that we can explore with this. The kids (and their dad) can learn filmmaking. I can help them learn how to organize and outline their thoughts.

The boys fight each other quite a bit (as you might imagine given their age). I hope (perhaps naively) that they’ll be able to connect on their shared interest of Pokemon.

Specific: There are a lot of small steps to this one. There is also a wide range of doing this “just to get the checkmark in the box” and doing it really well. I prefer the latter, but we may have to settle for the former.
Measurable: I’m going to strive for 10 hours of work/play on this over the year.
Attainable: We’ll make little or no progress during the school year. The kids just have too much to do. This will depend on how much time during the summer they have, which depends on whether there is summer camp or not.
Relevant: It’s hard to say how relevant this is. The kids’ interests change quickly and I try to adapt to the next thing if something doesn’t stick.
Time-bound: December 31, 2021

Drone Flying

I got the kids a small drone for around $25. It’s enough to keep them interested and teach them the basics. I have a more advanced $70 one that I got on Black Friday last year, that we can move on to.

I don’t know where it will go, but maybe we can work our way to a side-hustle in drone videography?

(This may be a not-so-elaborate plan to justify buying myself a fancy, expensive drone.)

Specific: We’ll try to get 10 hours of flight time in. Drone batteries don’t last long, so it may be 45 minutes here and there. Five hours might be more practical.
Measurable: I’m not sure if hours is the correct measurement. Maybe I should aim for 10 days that have drone flight in them?
Attainable: We should be able to achieve any goal in this area if they stay interested.
Relevant: I’m not sure that drone-flying is relevant to much, but it’s some good entertainment and a welcome break from video screens.
Time-bound: December 31, 2021

Riding Bikes and Outdoor Stuff

I’m terrible with getting the kids outside in physical activity. I need to do better whether it is riding bikes or playing catch with a baseball.

Specific: I’m going to try to get 40 hours of this in. I’m not sure if that’s the right number or not. The kids did snowboarding so far this year and that was good for 5 hours. I’m not going to count the whole days that we spend at the beach as more than 1 or 2 hours. I want to be more consistent rather than fulfilling this in a handful of days.
Measurable: I don’t want to feel like I’ve got a stopwatch timing things outside. However, I need to keep this more at the forefront of my mind.
Attainable: This can be a tough one with COVID, the weather, and available time outside of school and summer camp (if camp happens).
Relevant: The kids definitely need their outside time.
Time-bound: December 31, 2021

Computer Programming

I really need to get these kids started in computer programming. I wish it was like when I was a kid, where the computer was an endless source of amazement. With YouTube and Alexa, it’s hard to get kids excited in making a computer print “Hello World” infinite times.

Specific: I think the goal for this should be 5 hours. I’ve got some ideas on how to make this more fun and interesting.
Measurable: Putting a specfic goal in terms of hours makes this more measurable. I was going to tie this to accomplishments (ooh maybe a progress test), but I’m not prepared enough at this time to make that leap.
Attainable: Like all of these goals in the parenting section, it’s a matter of carving out the time in an already busy schedule.
Relevant: I believe computer programming is very relevant. I was learning it in 1985 in school and at home. I was literally writing code on music tapes. The kids have their own iPads and laptops at school this year and they don’t much in this area. Sometimes, they drag some blocks of code in Scratch. It’s odd to me that there hasn’t been more progress in education of this area in a generation. I’m officially Grumpy Old man in the old SNL skits… back when SNL skits were awesome :).
Time-bound: December 31, 2021

Specialty Camps

We had to cancel many specialty camps for the kids last year – the first year they were old enough to do them. Hopefully, they can do Lego, cooking, animal shelter, theater, sailing camps. If that’s not possible, we can at least do Lego and cooking at home. We were able to save a lot of money last year, so that’s a silver lining.

Specific: Sign up for 3-4 specialty camps.
Measurable: Check.
Attainable: With COVID, who knows? We have the money if they off them.
Relevant: These enrichment activities help the kids grow in different ways over the summer school break. If they don’t have these camps, we’ll have to invent our own by doing them at home like last summer.
Time-bound: December 31, 2021

Final Thoughts

Wow, this was a lot of work to write all this out. I thought it would take only an hour, but I think I spent 6-7 hours over a couple of days. I feel like I’m hastily putting up this blog post just like before. That’s what happens to me when I get to 3,500 words.

Fortunately, it was much easier to put in this spreadsheet.

That didn’t take too much time. I learned a lot along the way about how I want to craft my goals. Before I had just an idea, but now I feel like I have a plan, especially in the goals that are more nebulous like “spend more time outside with kids.”