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New Year’s Resolutions and Goals Update (April 2023)

April 25, 2023 by Lazy Man Leave a Comment

Way back in January, I made some New Year’s Resolutions and Goals for 2023. My plan was to give updates eight times a year – twice a quarter. We’re a little more than 30% of the way through the year, and I’m just getting to my first update. Let’s chalk that up as my first failure of the year.

Here’s my updated goal spreadsheet. It may be useful to refer back to this as you read the explanations below.

Lazy Man’s 2023 Goals and Resolutions

Money

Income: $26,820 (Goal: $90,000)

I made $98,000 in 2022 – much of it due to exploding demand for my dog boarding business. It felt like everything went perfectly. I wanted to give myself a little room to take it a bit easier this year.

In addition to boarding dogs, I have this blog that makes some money. I also run customer relationship management for a small Silicon Valley tech startup.

It can be a lot, but most of the work is flexible and not too challenging. It gives me a lot of other time to do dishes, laundry, grocery shop, and cook. I also shuttle the kids to/from school and after-school activities.

Now you know why I may fail on some of the goals below.

So far, I’m just a percent or two below my goal. I consider that a big win. Blogging hasn’t gone well this year, and home renovations limited a little of the dog boarding business. Business usually picks up in the summer, so there’s a chance that I can do more here.

Wife Retirement Savings: -$800 (Goal $30,000)

My wife is looking to save another $30,000 in her squirreled-away account to reach $100,000 in liquid savings. She could definitely retire now but would like that extra security blanket.

So she’s saved about -$800, so that’s not going too well. We had a bunch of surprise expenses where we had to stress test our money. Also, we spent heavily on those home renovations… which prevented me from bringing in money. Finally, we prepaid a good portion of the $5400 in summer camp costs this year.

The good news is that these numbers are through the end of March (the last of the numbers I have) and don’t factor in April. It’s been a good income month for me, so I’m taking care of much of the family expenses. She should be able to put a large part of her check into savings.

Estate Planning

I’ve been trying to create an estate plan for a long time. The big stumbling block is that the lawyers want our money situation in their format (every account, every share, etc.), and putting that on paper is very tedious.

I may need to give up and just give them a spreadsheet or some account totals. I could always print out my holdings via Empower or NewRetirement.

Before I get started on this, I need to finish last year’s taxes. Optimistically, I think this could be done in June. That may be the best-case scenario, though.

Insurance Review

We became very good friends with a great insurance agent about a year and a half ago. We should have done an insurance review with her before now.

We have most of our insurance with USAA, and my wife has access to that. I think I can only see one car insurance when I log in. We have a lot of different types of insurance, and we effectively have a significant financial “presence” in four states. Not all companies service each state.

I’ve also been putting this off because that friend has had a few rough months with health. Maybe in a month, we’ll be able to move forward.

Business

Kid Wealth: 3,120 Page Views, 7 articles (Goal 50,000 PV, 75 articles)

Last year, I had five thousand page views, and I’m on pace for double that this year. That’s still quite a ways below fifty thousand page views. I would need something to go a little viral to get that many.

I haven’t been very motivated to work on Kid Wealth. I tried to hire someone on Upwork to help with Pinterest. I got fifty applications, and I spent hour after hour reviewing applications. By the time I picked the person and had started to onboard her, we had to go away on vacation. She had enough information to get started but didn’t do anything. Now a month has gone by, and I think it’s just best to cut my losses on it.

If you happen to be good with Pinterest and want to earn some extra money, contact me. I can’t pay much because it’s not designed to make money. I’d need someone who would consider it mostly a labor of love, a way to learn and build a portfolio, and lastly, a way to make an extra couple hundred dollars a month. The time commitment would be limited.

I’ve some ideas for a few new articles, so hopefully, I’ll finish the year with at least 40. I don’t think there’s a chance of getting to my original goal of 75 articles.

Content Audit: 1 Article (Goal: 15 Articles)

A content audit is a review and refresh of older articles on a website. Lazy Man and Money has over 2700 articles over 17 years of publishing. That’s a LOT of outdated articles.

For a couple of years, I wanted to go through some of my old articles and update them to make them more relevant for today. It takes some time to do the additional research and rewrite them.

I was able to create one article that was in the spirit of a content audit. I wrote about how to save money at McDonald’s, which incorporated some ideas that were “blasts from the past.” In other words, I included tips from older articles that don’t work nowadays from a historical perspective. I’m not sure if that part is useful, but I put all the current, relevant stuff at the beginning, so readers can get that information first.

Dog Boarding Website

I get most of my dog boarding business through Rover.com. Rover takes a 15% commission, and it’s well-deserved when they bring me business.

However, I’ve started getting more business through local connections. I need to have a website so people can book outside of the Rover system. That way, I don’t have to give up that 15% fee. That could mean as much as $10,000 a year for me.

Health

Lose Weight: 187 lbs, 25.7% body fat (Goal: 175lbs 24%)

I got close to the goal last year, but I couldn’t keep at it.

With the three jobs and everything else going on, I don’t have a lot of time to do extra exercise. I used to walk my dog a lot, but since he passed last month, I just don’t get out as much. I need to turn that around.

I’m eating relatively healthy – at least relatively for me compared to the past. I’m just eating too much. I should be able to bring this down if I focus on it a bit more. That’s one reason why it’s important for me to post these updates more often. I had lost focus on it.

Health Wins: 50 (Goal: 360)

I wrote an Extreme Lazy Man’s Diet a couple of years ago. It’s really difficult to keep up with it consistently. However, picking one or two items a day isn’t bad.

My big “health win” is to start the day with a salad bowl of raw baby carrots and broccoli. I make it and put it on the counter. Then I pick at it over the next few hours as I’m doing stuff around the house.

I haven’t been keeping track of my health wins which is a problem. If I track it, I’m sure I’ll grow the number. My 50 number is an estimate. It’s almost all veggie bowls and walking when we were on vacation at theme parks.

Dentist

I completed this one already this year. I needed to find a new dentist. Sounds easy, but it wasn’t. I’ve had a string of bad dentist situations.

Fortunately, I’ve found a great dentist, and I’ve been a few times already. I’m looking forward to my next couple of visits coming up in June.

ADHD diagnosis: No Progress

I think I have ADHD. There’s a family history, and I feel like I have all the signs. Getting tested is difficult between dealing with insurance and doctor referrals.

I’ve made no progress on this.

Hobbies

My goal was to come up with hobbies. Lately, it seems all my hobbies have largely been related to work or parenting. Kid Wealth is a perfect example of a hobby (it might make $5 a month). I need to come up with some other stuff.

Below are my ideas. Unless noted, I’ve made zero progress on them.

Read Three “Fun” Books

I have a ton of sports books that I’ve been gifted over the years. I’m not limiting this to only sports books, though. I can’t remember the last adult book (to differentiate it from kid books that I read for Kid Wealth) that I finished. It might be my possible ADHD that makes it so difficult for me to concentrate on a book.

I continue to pick up a book, read a few chapters, and put it down for three weeks.

Drone Flying

I bought myself a drone last Christmas (16 months ago), and I haven’t done anything other than get it to hover in the living room. I want to spend more time learning how to fly, but I also want to do it with my kids. We are also boarding a few dogs at any given time – so it’s hard to just leave them to go fly a drone.

Finally, the weather is getting good enough to do this.

Guitar

When I published my goal for this earlier this year, I only wrote, “I want to,” before I must have gotten distracted by a shiny object. I published it just like that. I’d like to learn how to play a song.

Program in Python

Last year, I had this goal and didn’t make much progress. I want to create a “toy” app. It doesn’t have to be useful, but just something that gets me back to being the software engineer that I used to be.

Family

Clean and Organize House

The painters and flooring people finished their work on our house in late January. It felt awesome – for about the first two weeks. The awesome feeling fades as it starts to become just a normal house.

We made a little progress with declutter until our Earth Day Freecycle Event. I picked up a few things to keep, but we got stuck with everyone else’s junk to trash or donate. We can only throw out so much trash per week. The place we found to donate will take nearly anything, but it’s 20 minutes away, so we can only haul so much at a time.

At some point, we’ll get rid of everyone else’s junk, and the event helped us get rid of much of our awesome stuff we didn’t want anymore. We’re moving backward in the short term, but it should be a good step forward in the long term.

Travel

When I made this goal, it was up in the air because our dog was fourteen years old. Now we don’t have to worry about that – sad :(.

We always try to do an annual staycation at Block Island. This year we booked some dates, but my wife’s work may pull her leave for a mandatory meeting. It would be hard to reschedule because I’ve already got at least one dog booked for about 75% of the summer.

In late August, we’ll take some time off and go to New York City, Hershey Park, and maybe the Cartoon Network Hotel. We do Hershey almost every year but missed last year to go on a big Disney Cruise. We haven’t booked any of this yet. I’m going to start planning some days in a spreadsheet.

We booked our Aruba timeshare over Thanksgiving – when the kids have a break from school. The flights seem to be $1,500+ per person, though. Ouch! Maybe it’s best to just sell our week this year and make a pile of money boarding dogs with holiday rates. Instead of paying $6,000 in flights, we’d make about $6,000.

The personal finance convention, FinCon, is in New Orleans in October. My wife and I love New Orleans. I’m happy to pull the kids out of school for a few days to go. There’s a lot of culture there. It will be a great field trip.

Usually, we have three trips. It was looking like we might do five. Now, it’s looking like three trips again if we can’t sort out Block Island and Aruba. If we save money by not doing Aruba, I think we’ll end up doing a fancy European Cruise the following March.

Kids

The kids are keeping busy so far this year. We seem to be doing something after school every day, whether it’s karate, Cub Scouts, Lego Robotics, or baseball. We finished Lego Robotics, but we’ve just started with baseball with our youngest.

We accomplished another year of skiing/snowboarding lessons in the winter. They know enough now that we can just go skiing someplace. I’ll be the one that needs lessons as I have only been skiing once, and that was over ten years ago.

YouTube Channel (20 videos)

The kids made five videos, and they have a total of thirty-six views.

The goal isn’t to become YouTube stars. I view it as an extension of their school drama class. I want the kids to be comfortable in front of a camera, learn how to edit videos, and be able to present their ideas. If all that fails, they are being creative, which is always a great learning experience.

I work with them to figure out how we can make the videos better. Today in the car, I explained why some YouTube videos get way more views than other videos. It was a very, very high-level explanation of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This is fun for me too.

Sports

My nine-year-old has his first baseball game tomorrow. I don’t know if he’s ever been in a batter’s box. They had two practices, and he missed one because he was sick. In the other one, they just practiced fielding and running the bases. This will be… interesting.

My ten-year-old has decided he’s not athletic, though he’s about a 10-months away from a black belt in karate. I want to work with him more this summer, practicing various sports. Some of his camps end early, so we should be able to get a lot of time outside.

Digital Art

My nine-year-old loves art. I spotted a deal on a Samsung S7 Tablet last year. It came with a great digital pen. I think learning how to use art software would be great for him.

He has picked it up a little bit but hasn’t really stuck with it. I think he forgets about it. I forgot about it, too, until this update.

Computer Programming

Lego Robotics was light on computer programming. My ten-year-old wasn’t too excited to go each week, but he sure liked it when his team won at the end. My nine-year-old didn’t have much programming at his lower-level version.

Fortunately, the kids’ school is adding an after-school programming class. It’s just for grades 1-3, so only my nine-year-old qualifies. It’s stupid Scratch, which annoys me to no end. They’ve been doing some form of Scratch-like programming with a bunch of toys for years. Kids should be learning Python in the second grade.

Specialty Camps

We booked all the summer camps. Now we just need to execute in getting the kids to them. Cooking, art, animal care, theater, stagecraft, and sailing are on the docket.

Final Thoughts

That’s a big list of things. I know we won’t get to all of it. My hobbies, health, and Kid Wealth need a lot of work in particular.

I don’t want to get caught up in the negatives. There’s a lot that’s going really well. Financially we are doing well. The kids are awesome all around. Traffic to Kid Wealth has doubled. I even got a little of the content audit done for the first time in two years of having it on the list.

Filed Under: Goals Tagged With: 2023 goals, New year's resolutions

2021 Goals and Resolutions

January 7, 2021 by Lazy Man 9 Comments

New Year's Resolutions

Yes, I’m a glutton for punishment. I realize that making goals for 2021 is some weird, perverse exercise after 2020. Nonetheless, I feel motivated with the new year, so I might as well take advantage of it. Also, unlike at the start of 2020, I know a little of what to expect in 2021. There will always be surprises, but hopefully, we’ll be able to navigate them well.

The other reason why it’s good to make goals for 2021 is that you already have a built-in excuse. That might not help you accomplish your goals, but I know I won’t feel bad when 2022 comes around if I don’t accomplish all these.

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.

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.

Business Goals

I have many things that I would to like to do with this website. Essentially, I need to roll over many of my 2020 goals to 2021.

However, I have one other thing to add. You have to promise not to tell anyone now, but I’m working on a new personal finance website. Lazy Man and Money isn’t going away. My personal finance interests have evolved beyond passive income, so a spin-off makes sense.

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 post on the fridge where post our daily weigh-ins.

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.

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

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.

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.

She’s 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.

We have numerous hurdles on this one. I don’t want to leave our dog with just anyone for that long. There’s also this thing called COVID which seems to like it could be a barrier to traveling through 3 countries, especially including a cruise ship. Coming back, I wouldn’t want to have to quarantine, because that may be up to 2 weeks of figuring out how to get food delivered (we go to the grocery store now) and stuff like that. My wife would go back to working from home, but I wouldn’t be able to send the kids to camp. The dynamic of my wife needed uninterrupted time for military work at home and me having to keep the kids in activities so they don’t kill each other simply doesn’t work.

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. There’s a lot of extra stuff like food overflow.

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.)

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

Final Thoughts

Some of these goals conflict with others. It’s hard to do specialty summer camps when you are on a cruise ship in Greece. It’s hard to save money when you are doing extensive travel and home improvements. The kids have only so many hours in the day and I like some of them to be free to do whatever silliness they want. Yet, I have so many things here that I want to do with them.

We’ll have to figure out how to prioritize things in this ever-changing world. But that’s what life is all about, right? With the goals that conflict, we’ll simply have to accept that there are no right or wrong decisions. Each has its own merits and as long as we are moving forward with something, we’re doing well.

Filed Under: Goals Tagged With: New year's resolutions

Reviewing my 2018 Goals and Plans

January 3, 2019 by Lazy Man 3 Comments

It’s January 3rd and I already feel behind on 2019. Most of the bloggers somehow managed to write their year-end recaps at the end of year.

On the positive side, I created my 2018 Goals and Plans in February. In comparison, I’m doing quite well.

In last year’s article, I listed a bunch of quick excuses why I didn’t accomplish as much as I wanted in 2017. I was the main care-giver for a 3 and 4 year old. I spent a lot of time reading politics. I was being sued for defamation, which can be a multi-millionaire affair… not like a 30 minute Judge Judy thing that you might expect.

In recapping 2018, much of the same was true, except that the boys are a year older. Oh and I won that lawsuit! For the first time in about 6 years, I have no pending defamation lawsuits… and I didn’t lose a single one. One thing that I’ve learned in the process is that, for independent publishers, there’s no such thing as freedom of speech against large corporations. The legal system hasn’t evolved from antiquated state laws that were better designed to protect big news media such as HBO or the New York Times.

Sorry about the rant, but one New York woman was sued for a million dollars due to a negative Yelp review. It’s cost her more than $20,000 to defend initially and spiraled out of control for just talking about the case.

Let’s move on…

Last year I shared the Four Burners theory:

Essentially you imagine your life is a stove with different burners. They represent family, friends, health, and work. The theory is that to “be successful you have to cut off one of your burners. To be really successful you have to cut off two.”

I don’t really believe it’s healthy to cut off any of those burners (especially the “health” one, because that would be the definition of unhealthy). I believe in trying to find a balance among them all. I know that I won’t be Julian Michaels (health) or Jeff Bezos (money), but I don’t need to be. I like to think you define successful yourself.

To make this analogy more difficult, none of these burners include any time for yourself. It is very important to read a book, watch a favorite show/movie, meditate, journal, or enjoy your favorite hobby…

… So, I’ve got to manage five burners, which is now two more than I should have to be successful.

For the past few years, the gas in my five burners has been about 45% family, 35% work, and 10% myself, 5% health, and 5% friends.

I’m not sure that’s a good mix. I’m curious what your mix is. (Let me know in the comments.)

I decided to break down my goals and plans into different areas.

Productivity

I’m going to give myself a grade of C in Productivity. That might be overly generous too.

My plan was to do the following 4 things:

  1. I will be more organized and reduce clutter. I’ve let too much pile up over the last year or two. It’s time to reduce and simplify.
  2. I will plan my most productive day. Again, having a plan is a good thing. Executing on it is better. That’s going to be the hard part.
  3. I will stop fighting poor technology. In an effort to save money, I fought my old computer that had too little memory. It often meant waiting up to 30 seconds for a new Firefox tab to load. (I have a Firefox tab hoarding problem.) I have already solved this by buying a new computer. Now things are fast. I’ve found that I’m am more productive, but the real time spent is often in that browser tab, not just waiting for it to load.
  4. I’m going to try to use the Pomodoro Technique. I think that structure will help me get more done.

I got a little more organized at the beginning of the year and during the last couple of months of the year. We got some Ikea Kallax shelving units and it has made a huge difference.

We need to do a better job of getting rid of stuff though. By “we”, I mean “me.” My wife has continued to sell outdated kids toys on Ebay and at church yard sales. I need to be more active in these areas. Perhaps more importantly, I just need to let stuff go. It hurts me to see good functional stuff go into a landfill. It hurts me less if it goes on Freecycle, but then I think, “Shouldn’t I have been able to get a few dollars for that?”

I don’t remember planning my most productive day and I only did the Pomodoro technique about a dozen times.

The new computer did help with the fight against old technology. Unfortunately, now that it has the memory to handle hundreds of Firefox tabs, I now have hundreds of Firefox tabs. My computer is a victim of Parkinson’s Law.

Essentially, I need to consistently use the systems that I think will work for me.

Motivation

I felt like I didn’t have competitive fire going into 2018.

Throughout the year I felt like I had gathered a little more motivation, but it still isn’t where it needs to be. I’ll give myself a grade of B-. This isn’t a great goal because it is so subjective, so maybe I’ll do better in making my 2019 goals.

If you have any suggestions, please reach out in the comments.

Money

Last year, I made a note that because this is a blog about money, I should have quantifiable money goals. Unfortunately, I do not.

With much of our money in real estate and the stock market, I’m piggybacking on whatever the market does. That’s been a great thing for quite a few years. Alas, 2018 wasn’t a good year for stocks. However, our real estate did better. I’m saving the full financial analysis of 2018 for a future blog post, but I think we did quite well considering.

Since it’s foolish to make a money goal about things you don’t control, I put my focus in another area:

Charting Energy Gal’s Retirement

Few people realize that this blog was created in 2006 as an answer to my wife’s ability to retire early due to her military service. I didn’t want to work another 20 years. I wanted to spend that time with her traveling or whatever it was we found interesting.

The difficulty is that my wife’s military status gives us a great discount at a great school for the kids. Retirement likely means that income in cut substantially while those expenses double. It’s a big decision, bigger than the typical, “Can I Retire?” question that people have.

One of my goals of 2018 was to help navigate that nearly impossible task. While there are still plenty of questions to be answered, I’m giving myself my an A- on this. Financially, a few things fell into place for me and it looks like they’ll stick for some time. It could close the gap. We’ll have to run some numbers and see where things stand.

Blog, Health, and Personal Growth Goals

I lumped these all together when I made them in 2018. It’s appropriate that I give myself a failing grade at all three together in 2019. I didn’t grow my blog traffic 20% like I had hoped. In fact, it might have shrunk. I didn’t lose those 10 pounds. Our December vacation to Aruba torpedos that. (Not that I would have achieved it anyway.) I didn’t join Toastmasters as it meets at night on a day when my wife works late.

Travel/Fun

We went to Orlando twice. One we had already planned before the start of 2018. The other was for the annual FinCon conference.

We also did our annual Block Island trip. I love getting away from deadlines and even technology for a bit.

Finally, there was the aforementioned Aruba trip at the timeshare my wife bought a long, long time ago.

We’ll probably have around the same amount of vacations this year. For the most part they’ll probably be to the same places for a variety of logistical reasons. I think in 2020 we’ll start to change things up.

I’ll give myself an A on this part, simply because it’s the one area that seems to have went exactly according to plan.

Final Thoughts

2018 was the first year that I tried this kind of format in setting goals. I should have planned some goals better. I definitely could have executed better. For 2019, I want to add goals for what I hope to teach the kids and what kind of activities we’ll do.

I want to get some of these goals to be more specific and more quantifiable. I want to be able to break them down so that each quarter or even each month, I’m moving forward on some kind of plan.

And hopefully, I’ll be able to get those goals together by next week. That would put me far ahead of the February pace of last year.

Filed Under: Goals Tagged With: New year's resolutions

Top 3 Personal Finance Wisdom Nuggets to See You Through the Next 11 Months

January 25, 2017 by Lazy Man Leave a Comment

2017 is already underway and many New Year resolutions would have started fizzling out under the realities of the natural human tendency to resist change. Interestingly, some of the commonest New Year resolutions that we make often involve important personal finance goals such as getting out of debt, saving more money, and simply taking control of our financial destinies.

The economy could sure use more people with healthy finances because in increase in our individual wealth reduces the strain on social services. This article provides insight into three personal finance wisdom nuggets that can help your stay financially healthy in the next 11 months.

Last year’s tech would be cheaper, and that’s a good thing

2017 is already underway and we can expect a new generation of consumer electronic devices to debut. From smartphones to smartwatch, computers, tablets, digital personal assistants, and connected home devices; bigger, thinner, smarter, and more expensive devices will surface. Last year’s technology will still work almost as well as the new devices because tech firms are only coming to market with marginal improvements over last year’s tech. My wife and I are still rocking a Nexus 5 that are probably around 3 years old now. So if you haven’t bought the iPhone 7 until now, you might want to wait a couple of months more for when the iPhone 8 debuts – you’ll should be able to buy the iPhone7 at a discount.

Money Jar

Donald Trump will be a major market-moving phenomenon

Love him or hate him, Trump is going to make a difference. Passive investors who tend to buy a couple of stocks and go back to sleep with the expectation of gains at the end of the quarter should probably rethink their strategy this year. Index funds and diversified investments are your friends as usual. You’ll need to pay more attention to news outlets this year if you plan to be involved in the financial markets trading stocks, forex, commodities or other types of asset this year.

Victor Alagbe, analyst at 24option notes that “by tradition, the POTUS usually avoids making direct references to stakeholders in the financial markets.” You can expect president Trump to deviate from the norm. He would not hesitate to give a piece of his mind or a Tweet of his fingers on any firm or executive that crosses his path and such outburst will have a material effect on moving the markets.

You can’t escape the need for an emergency savings fund

You might have been able to survive 2016 without an emergency savings fund (quite unlikely) but it is unlikely that you’ll escape unscathed this year. Murphy’s Law states that “if anything can go wrong, it will go wrong”. Hence, you need to expect that the plumbing will go out of hand, your smartphone will fall more times that you expect, and you might need to your dog might need a surgical procedure that must not be delayed.

We are still in the first month of the year and this is the best time to create a $1000 emergency savings fund. You might also want to go the extra mile to save up a raining day fund that you help you cover your living expenses for three to six months in case you lose your job suddenly.

Filed Under: Finances Tagged With: New year's resolutions, trump

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