July marks the middle of the year and we’re more than halfway though that. That means that I better have made some serious progress on my 2022 New Year’s goals/resolutions. My first update was in March and my last one was in May.

Setting goals feels useless if you don’t review them. Reviewing them now gives me time to refocus and adjust.

So let’s check in where I am now. As I write this, it is July 18th. About 54% of the year is over. I should be a little more than halfway done with all my goals.

Here’s my updated spreadsheet:

Money Goals

(Click for Larger Image)

Make $70K of income

The dog boarding business is going great as usually does in the summer. With my other income streams blogging, and a part-time customer service gig, I’m 68% toward my goal. It’s looking like I could get to $90,000 this year, but we have a big vacation coming up. We’ll see how it goes. So far the vacations haven’t derailed my income goals yet.

Save Money for Wife’s Retirement

We are stuck at only having put $5,000 away in my wife’s retirement. She’s back to maxing out her government TSP account (similar to a 401k), so she’s still saving money for retirement. However, this goal was about saving cash for use before then.

We’re spending a lot of money this year. We finished a basement and our vacation spending is high. This summer we’ve gone out to eat a lot, but some of that is due to local staycations.

We’ll likely miss this goal, but maybe we can at least make it close near the end of the year.

Business Goals

KidWealth.com

I’m at only 5% of my goal to get to 50,000 page views. That’s not good enough. It only takes one article to go viral though, so you never know. I was starting to see some good growth, but it started to trail off. In the summer, I’m very focused on the busy dog boarding season and the good weather outside. We also go on more vacations (two weeks in June!) and the kids are in camp for only 5 hours of the day.

My goal was to have 75 articles published by the end of the year. That’s roughly 1.5 a week. I’ve published 45 articles. That’s 60% of the way to my goal, which is a little ahead of where I need to be. I’m surprised because it feels like I’ve been writing less.

Recently, I posted an article that highlights much of the content that I’ve written for the first six months. Here’s what I know about teaching kids about money so far.

Content Audit/Article Refresh

I’ve made no progress in refreshing articles for Lazy Man and Money. Creating content for two blogs is a lot of work. I don’t see having the time to go back and rewrite old articles too.

Look into Dog Training

Earlier in the year, I looked very briefly into dog training. It seems there are a hodge-podge group of certifications. It’s hard to find out which ones are useful. I suppose I could do the very easiest ones that seem a little like window dressing and add them to my dog boarding profile. I’m not too excited by that idea and right now the dog boarding is going well enough without it. If I were to train some of the dogs that I’m boarding, I wouldn’t have any time left to blog.

I think I’ll have to pass on this for now.

Personal Goals

Lose Weight

My last update was great and losing 13 pounds left me with only 4 left. However, the vacation set me back and I gained 6 pounds back. It’s hard on vacation because I don’t want to control my eating much. I also don’t have the good habits that I formed at home.

I will need to refocus, but even if I lose weight now, I’ll likely put it on by September. I’ll explain why in the vacation update below.

Drink Less

Over the last couple of months, I added around 50 alcoholic drinks. Almost all of them are light beers with little alcohol and calories. While on vacation, it’s easier to have a drink. I also like to have a beer in the inflatable hot tub at night. It’s a great way to relax from a busy day.

My goal was to limit drinking to 5 a month and I’m way over that. Overall though, I’m far under what I have been and I generally feel healthier and happier.

Make a Bucket List

I made no progress on my bucket list. I didn’t even look at it.

However, I put a lot of effort into helping the kids with theirs. After a few rounds of revisions, it’s looking good. You can read more about how I went : Making a “Things I Like” list for kids.

One takeaway: Next year we should leave a week free in the summer with no camps and no travel. I feel like we are overscheduled, so there’s no flexibility to add a fun day in-between.

Programming with Python

I was going to order this Python Programming for Beginners: A Kid’s Guide to Coding Fundamentals on Prime Day, but it wasn’t any cheaper. It seems that Python for Kids: A Playful Introduction To Programming is a highly-rated book along the same lines. I would pick a book aimed at kids because I could then pass it on to them when I’m done.

Family Goals

Get Organized

I’m not making much progress in this one. My wife organized a yard sale. I didn’t end up helping too much because I was focused on the dog boarding. We didn’t get a lot of traffic, but we sold a few items. We’ll need to run a few more.

I posted my first item on Nextdoor a few days ago, but I have no takers yet. It’s a big set of wooden pallets that we inherited when we bought our house. So far there are no bites. They take up a lot of space, so if I can move them to a new home, the garage will look a lot cleaner.

I haven’t been pulling my weight here, so I’m going to give myself a bad grade, but thanks to my wife, we’re doing okay in this area.

Travel Four Times

In March we completed our Puerto Rico trip. Everyone in the family loved it, while I thought it was just kind of okay. After we got back we learned that our kids’ school is switching languages from French to Spanish. Looks like we’ll be going back more often.

In June, we went to Block Island and New Hampshire as I mentioned in my last passive income update.

We booked a European Disney Cruise in August. It’s a bucket list life event. I have only been to Europe once and it was around 20 years ago. I’m not a big travel person, but this has something for everyone. The kids will be in the ultimate heaven with nothing, but an overload of fun. My wife is excited to visit all the different countries. I’m a little excited by both, but mostly just happy that everyone else is happy.

The downside is that Disney Cruises are very expensive. That’s one reason why aren’t saving as much cash lately. In addition to that, there’s going to be so much free food around all the time, so I will likely be very behind on my weight loss goals by the next update.

That would be our fourth travel, but we might also travel in November around Thanksgiving. Maybe we won’t because the Disney Cruise counts as at least two normal vacations.

Parenting Goals

The kids got their final report cards and they were awesome. They’ve always done well, but this seemed better than usual.

YouTube Channel

We’ve done nothing in this area. We haven’t even uploaded a bad video. Our 9-year-old finished theater camp and loved it, so maybe that will be a springboard to getting them to work on this.

Drone Flying

I brought my DJI Mavic Mini to Block Island but never got it in the air. So far I’ve only got it to hover in my living room for a few seconds. That took about an hour of learning how to set it up and about regulations and things like that.

Computer Programming

My 8-year-old is doing the Lego camp that the 9-year-old loved last year. He’s loving it. I signed them up for the local Lego robotics group that starts in September. I’m going to volunteer to be a coach, but as you can tell from many items on this list, I’m perpetually busy.

This may not be full-on computer programming, but it’s a start and the kids are interested in it.

Specialty Camps

We’re about 40% through the summer camps and so far they’ve been a great success. The only blemish so far is that the first day of sailing camp hasn’t gone well with the older kid. That’s the camp that I picked. He has a few friends in the camp, so I thought that would be helpful. Our area, Newport, RI, is a big sailing city, so it makes sense to have some basic sailing knowledge. Sometimes new experiences don’t work out, but you have to give them a fair shot.

Final Thoughts

Once again, there were a lot of things that came back with “no progress”. However, I made big progress on the items that are “work hard, play hard”. The business and family goals are good, so minor things like not flying a drone very often seem petty.

It’s May and it has been a while since I checked in on my 2022 New Year’s goals/resolutions. My first update was in March 2022. I made some decent progress on many of them. Setting goals is useless if you don’t review them. Reviewing them now gives me time to refocus and adjust.

So let’s check-in where I am now. As I write this, it is May 8th. About 34.8% of the year is over. That’s close enough to 1/3rd, right? So I should be about 1/3rd of the way through my goals.

Here’s my updated spreadsheet:

Money Goals

Make $70K of income

My income goals are going quite well. I didn’t expect dog boarding to continue to do as well as it has. It seems the only thing that slows down the business is when we actually go on vacation. We took a couple of weeks off in March to go to Puerto Rico and we’ll do it again in June to do some local traveling.

The $26,116.78 comes from blogging, dog boarding and a freelance customer service job that I do. This includes the slow months of January and February. The summer months are usually my best earning months, so maybe $85,000 is possible.

Save Money for Wife’s Retirement

Since my income is doing well, we’ve been able to put $5,000 away for my wife’s retirement. I had hoped to put in more, but during the first quarter of the year we were paying off the bill for our finished basement. In February, be booked travel. In March, we had a bunch of summer camp bills hit. In April, we wrote some checks to save in our Roth IRAs instead of in this account.

This goal might end up being moot. My wife may not be retiring soon as she started a new position at the beginning of the year. Secondly, we’re selling a rental property condo, which would close out this goal quickly.

Business Goals

KidWealth.com

I’m only about 3.5% of the way to my goal to 50,000 page views this year. That’s not great, but I am seeing growth every week. The 50,000 number depends on getting a decent media mention that will bring a couple of thousand of people at once and hope that a few hundred stick around on a regular basis.

Recently, I put a real home page together (instead of just the latest blog posts) and I’m organizing the information to hopefully make it easier for readers to navigate to just the right information to help their kids become financially literate.

My goal was to have 75 articles published by the end of the year. That’s roughly 1.5 a week. I’ve gotten 27 articles published. That’s 36% of the way to my goal, which is just about exactly where I need to be. I could be hard to hit this goal as I’ve “cheated” a bit and used some articles that I already had written for Lazy Man and Money.

Content Audit/Article Refresh

I’ve made no progress in refreshing articles for Lazy Man and Money. Creating content for two blogs is a lot of work. I don’t see having the time to go back and rewrite old articles too.

Look into Dog Training

I looked very briefly into dog training. It seems there are a hodge-podge group of certifications. It’s hard to find out which ones are useful. I suppose I could do the very easiest ones that seem a little like window dressing and add them to my dog boarding profile. I’m not too excited by that idea and right now the dog boarding is going well enough without it. If I were to train some of the dogs that I’m boarding, I wouldn’t have any time left to blog.

Personal Goals

Lose Weight

I’ve lost about 13 pounds this year. I’ve never consistently tried to lose weight, but for some reason it’s sticking now. We’ve been going out to eat a lot less than in the past. When we do, I try to eat only half my meal. Even then it sets me back about a day’s worth of progress.

Since the last update, I’ve only lost 3 pounds. I plateaued for over a month. It’s only in the last week that my weight has dropped around a half pound each day.

I’ve got about 4 pounds left to get to my goal. It seems reasonable.

My body fat percentage started the year at around 27.5 and it is now around 23.8%. That’s great progress. I’ve gotten it as low as 23.5%.

I met with my doctor about a week ago and she said that I’m doing great. She said that I could try to go off the blood pressure medication as I’m fine. She also said that cholesterol levels were looking great. The odd thing is that I’m not doing too much differently – just a little more vegetables and a low-carb omelet a few days a week for breakfast.

Drink Less

I drank about 10 alcoholic drinks since the last update. When we got to Puerto Rico there was a “welcome wine” as we checked in. They also had a welcome reception for Marriott Elite members. Another time, my wife said, “Four drinks: beer, diet coke, and two apple juices” and they ended up giving us four beers and the other drinks. I chalk it up to the language barrier though my wife’s Spanish is very good. Nonetheless, the beers were a dollar, so we ended up just bringing them back to the hotel room.

We went to an April Fools’ Day party (everyone please steal this idea – it’s a lot of fun) where I had a few more drinks. At restaurants, I’ll usually get a Diet Coke, but I had a beer on a recent date night. And that’s about it for a couple of months.

Perhaps, just maybe, not drinking has helped with the health gains in the previous section?

Make a Bucket List

I made no progress on my bucket list. I didn’t even look at it.

Programming with Python

I made no progress in looking at Python. I had gotten a book from the library, but I barely cracked it. I will probably buy the book – programming Python for kids ages 10-14. I just need to knock off the programming rust, but this book would be perfect for my kids.

Family Goals

Get Organized

Once again my wife is the hero here. She lead a city-wide freecycle event as a community service event for the Boy Scouts. Dozens of people dropped off stuff they didn’t want and picked up other people’s trash and made it their own treasure.

We got rid of a bunch of stuff. However, we got a little bit of stuff back. One item was a flat-panel television from 2010 – the cheapest one that Samsung made. It’s 42 inches, but it works fine and is perfect in our basement. I hooked up a Roku and the kids can watch a lot of things. I need more of those 10-minute solutions in my life.

I also need to learn how to sell items on Facebook marketplace. If I can do that, I can declutter a lot of the garage. I’m sure we could move a lot of stuff cheap.

Travel Four Times

We completed our Puerto Rico trip. Everyone in the family loved it, while I thought it was just kind of okay. After we got back we learned that our kids’ school is switching languages from French to Spanish, so maybe we’ll go more often.

We’ve booked Block Island and New Hampshire in June. They are two separate trips, but around the same time for various schedule reasons. In late August we have been thinking of a Disney cruise with an England trip. It would be awesome, but I have FinCon in early September, so I’m worried about taking all that time off just while the kids are getting back to school. We have some friends interested in going to Hershey Park with us. We’ve been to Hershey Park a lot, so this is easier for us. We don’t have to plan as much and we can do a few things along the way. The kids have learned about the Statue of Liberty in school and that could be a stop on the way.

Finally, we may be doing Aruba in November. The school changed the vacation to make the entire week of Thanksgiving a vacation. Unfortunately that’s one of the few times we get to see our family. Also, flying around Thanksgiving is super expensive.

Parenting Goals

We had the kids in too many things. We started the year in skiing and snowboarding, but for the last few months we had karate, baseball, soccer, drums, and Boy Scouts. All the sports were a couple of days a week. We paused karate for baseball and soccer seasons because it was too much.

YouTube Channel

We’ve done nothing in this area. We haven’t even put up a bad video. I remind the kids and they get super excited about it, but then they are onto the next thing.

Drone Flying

The weather is just getting good for flying drones. I know this is kind of a silly parenting goal, but it’s a substitute to just getting out and doing something. We could fly kites or something like that and I’d count that. We had some snow earlier this year and we went sledding. Next year, I’ll try to change this up to make it more generic.

For now the kids will just have to stay addicted to video games – LOL.

Computer Programming

I got them started with Tynker.com a bit last year. They didn’t love it. I am trying to set it up with Minecraft which they like. Maybe with my Python plan above, I can get them involved in that.

They’ve each looked at a computer programming book, so I’ll take what I can get for now.

The best chance is a local Lego robotics group, but it doesn’t start back up until September. I’m trying to prioritize that over all the other stuff, but it’s going to be tough.

Specialty Camps

We finished up signing up for summer camps. Summer camps are expensive. We’ve got sailing, veterinarian camp, and cooking camps booked. (Sailing is such a Rhode Island thing.) My older kid is starting theater camp while my younger one has a series of art, Lego, and maker camps. They are very excited about having camps in things that they love to do.

Final Thoughts

I suppose it was a successful couple of months? There are a lot of things that went into the “no progress” category, but in all the major categories we’ve got some good progress. I need to work more on the personal goals, but I’m enjoying building Kid Wealth right now, so who needs a bucket list?

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.

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.

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 it is still too inconsistent.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.