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.

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.