I set some pretty challenging financial goals for 2017, and it’s time to do the 1 month check-in. This will be really short and sweet because I don’t really have much to report…
#1 – Emergency Fund
Not much progress on this one, but if we don’t use any of the emergency fund money, that’s sort of a win in itself, right?
Human Emergency Fund = $6300 (+$100)
Pet Emergency Fund = $100 (+$100)
#2 – Planned Spending
So far, we have $250 of the $3000 saved for the first part of this goal. Better than nothing, but not exactly the savings rate that we need to be successful…
- Travel #1: $250 / $3000
- Income Tax: $0 / $400
- More Home Renos: $0 / $35,000
- Other Travel: $0 / $5000
- Other Savings: $0 / $16,000
#3 – Net Worth
If you read my initial post about my financial goals for 2017, you know that the goal is to actually decrease our savings because we are spending a big chunk on our home renovations. So… our net worth went down a bit this month, as to be expected… We started spending some of our home reno money… And as you saw above, we didn’t exactly save a lot… Not really much else to report on this one yet… Too early in the year…
#4 – Monthly Spending below $8000
Nope, not this month. January’s spending came in at $8800. $800 over the target. Which is why the savings in goals #1 and #2 were not as high as we wanted… You can see a big chunk of it is the red category, which is our mortgage. We are on a bi-weekly payment schedule now, and there were 3 payments in January… Without that, we would have been under, so maybe that’s not too big of a deal? We will see how we do in February…
So, not exactly the best result for the first month of 2017, but hopefully that will give us the motivation to do better in February, right?
All-Round Better Me 
Hi Jena, your method of keeping track of your spending is pretty cool. What do you use to put these financial reports together?
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Hello Eva! I use YNAB (you need a budget) to track our spending and budget, and it makes lots of pretty graphs and reports for me to play with. Plus, I use the spreadsheet application on my Mac computer to make some graphs too. I highly recommend taking a look at YNAB if you are looking for something to budget/track spending with.
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That’s really cool. I remember blogger Taralynn McNitt writing about this website/app… very cool. I’m going to have to try that out. This year one of my goals was to grow our family retirement accounts and pay off mortgage sooner!
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Those are great goals to have! And YNAB might be able to help you with them. You can do a full month long trial with it before purchasing, so it’s worth it to give it a shot.
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This looks like a great method of organization. Were you always like this. We have been talking about a budged for ages but we never seem to get anything on paper so I think we don’t even know where our money is going. How did you start?
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No, I definitely wasn’t always like this! I started with a simple spread sheet that I filled in, but often times people just start with a notebook where they write all their expenses. The key is to make starting as simple as possible for yourself. Once you start you can adjust how you do it, but getting started is the most important part. If you want to jump in head first, I’d suggest checking out YNAB. It’s the budgeting software that I use now. http://www.youneedabudget.com/
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Thank you so much for your answer. You’re very kind. I will definitely check it out.
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Please let me know if you have any other questions. 🙂
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I will, you’re so organized! I love that.
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Thanks! 🙂
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