Lazy Man Goals 2021 Final

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.