2015 Goals in Review

I can’t believe that it is almost 2016 already.  2015 was a busy and exciting year for me.  I hope 2016 is a bit quieter, but I doubt it will be.  I already know of all sorts of exciting and fun things that are in the works, so I’m enjoying the down time this week.  (I have the week off work and am spending a lot of it at home, reading and puttering around my house.)

Anyway, I figure it is best to get my 2015 review done before the end of the year, so I’m going a bit off schedule of my regular Tuesday/Thursday posts (regular in that I’ve been trying for that schedule for about a month now…) and am posting my review today so that I can squeeze it in before the new year.

Last year, I started my blog off with 4 posts about the goals I had for 2015.  I did a bunch of somewhat mid-year reviews in August and September that pretty much covered everything… and I honestly haven’t done much since then to get any further on my goals, so if you read that, this won’t really contain anything new… and will be a quick summary of how I did with my 2015 goals.  I’ll talk about my new 2016 goals in another post, probably next week.

Financial Goals

First up, my financial goals.  In my initial financial goals post I made five goals.  I reviewed them all in August, but didn’t really make any major changes to them…

1. Budget:  I am really happy with how far we have come with our budgeting.  We keep track of our spending, and while we aren’t always super frugal, we have made good strides towards living a more frugal life.  The turning point for me was definitely finding the YNAB software.  I am a sucker for the built in graphs and reports.
2. Planned Spending:  I’m not sure if I should be proud of the accomplishment of saving up a bunch of money then spending it all… but we did it.  We had three big savings goals and though we haven’t actually spent all the education money yet, it’s there waiting to be spent.  If we add that all up we saved over $30,000 for our planned spending this year.  That’s pretty good savings.  Now we just need to put that towards more long term goals…
3. RRSP: I started the year with a vague goal for my RRSP contributions, and throughout the year I made changes to it… first to make it more concrete… and then when I reached that goal a few times, I increased it.  I’m happy to report that at this moment, my RRSP is over $50,000 so despite my low value when I did my review in August, I did manage to meet this goal!  YAY!
4. TFSA: Let’s just say this didn’t happen and move on, shall we?
5. Emergency Fund:  Originally this was a $10,000 goal, but with over spending in a few areas throughout the year, I decided to go smaller to start… and $3000 was the final goal… unfortunately, I only made it to $2500.  Better than nothing, but not there yet.

Professional Goals

Reading over my three original professional goals, they weren’t really specific enough, or very measurable…  (definitely not “SMART” goals), so it doesn’t surprise me that in my mid-year review, and even now, I don’t really feel that I’ve done well at these goals.

Advertisement

Health & Fitness and Misc. Goals Update

Last week I did an update on both my financial goals and my professional goals.  I had planned to have this post written to publish on Monday this week, but then I got sick… and all I managed to do all weekend was sit on my couch and watch Netflix.  Not super productive, but that’s about all my brain and body could handle.  Now that I’m all back to normal (or mostly), I figured I should finish up my goals review and update with my health & fitness goals and my miscellaneous goals.

Health & Fitness Goals

I had 6 goals originally when I made them back in December.  The first was to lose 15lbs by my wedding.  Well, my wedding has come and gone… and I definitely wasn’t down 15lbs from my post-Christmas weight, so that was a FAIL!  However, I did manage to get almost 10lbs down before the summer festivities started up… I don’t really want to put emphasis on weight, as I am constantly reminded that it is about feeling good and being healthy, not about the numbers on the scale, but I want to make myself a new goal of being back down to that 10lbs below post-Christmas 2014 before the end of this year.  I realize that means that I am putting my deadline right after one of the worst times for weight gain… but so be it.

Professional Goals Update

Similar to my post yesterday reviewing my financial goals, today I’m going to quickly review my professional goals.  This will be a much shorter post because I only made 3 goals on my original professional goals post back in December.

The first goal was to write and pass my exam that will allow me to move up in my career.  I did that in April and received word in May that I had passed, so I called that goal complete.  However, I still haven’t completed the remaining paperwork to actually finish things up… So, I’m going to make this my new goal before Thanksgiving (Canadian Thanksgiving in October) to get that paperwork sorted out and submitted.

Financial Goals Update

On Friday I made mention that I would spend some time reviewing my goals from the beginning of the year and take some time to look at where I stand with them, and decide if they are still relevant or if I need to update them.  Back in December when I made my goals, I started with the Financial Goals, so I thought I’d start by reviewing them quickly…

I originally had 5 financial goals.  The first was to make and stick to a monthly budget.  I have made some definite progress on this one, and it went much better once I started using the YNAB software.  If you go through my monthly budgets, you’ll see that I haven’t once actually had a month that follows the initial budgeted plan… However, I have been learning a lot about our spending, and feel like we are very close to turning the corner… Hopefully around that corner is much less spending and much more saving.  We will see… But today I wanted to decide if I am achieving this goal or if it needs to be revamped in any way.  If I go with “sticking to a budget” as my definition of success, I am definitely failing.  But if, instead, I use the fact that each month I am making a budget, and then monitoring our spending closely, I feel like I am succeeding with this goal.  So I’m just going to leave it as is and keep plugging along.  Hopefully I’ll turn that corner soon!

My second financial goal was to save up for various large planned spending expenses.  2 of the 3 expenses are done and paid for.  We got our roof done in June, which emptied the home reno fund, and we just got married, so the wedding fund has been emptied as well.  So those were successful and completed goals.  The education fund for my fiance was put on the back burner when we were informed of the long wait-list for his program.  My husband (still strange, haha!) is now looking at going a different direction with his education, so we want to revisit this savings goal and try to get the $7500 that we wanted to save in there as soon as we can.  It’s August now, so let’s say I put a deadline on this savings goal of November 1.

Wedding Planning

One Month To Go!

I don’t want this blog to turn in to a wedding planning blog… but OMG I have one month to finish planning my wedding… I want to make sure that I keep myself accountable on a few things, and maybe share some things we are doing to save money on our wedding (we aren’t really doing much to save money… just pretty much splurging on everything…) And to be honest, my focus for the next month will probably be all wedding… so… sorry!  Once I’m married, we can return to regular programming…

Mission: Get Fit!

The countdown is on… According to my wedding website, I have 37 days until my wedding!

Time to up the ante, and get fit!  Or at least maintain my current status…

One of my original goals for the year was to lose 15 lbs before my wedding… as of my weigh-in this week, I’m almost back up to my Christmas weight… not good… Don’t worry, I don’t have the unrealistic expectation to lose 15 lbs in the next 37 days, however, I do want to see if I can at least feel like I put in a good last ditch effort to look and feel my best for the big day.

On one of her most recent “Fitness Friday” posts, Writer Style posted this 4 exercise challenge with squats, planks, push-ups and crunches (originally from catch 88).  I was intrigued… and perhaps inspired…

June 2015 – Goals in Review

HAPPY CANADA DAY!!!

Now, before I get started on this review, I have to admit that I’m getting a little tired of writing a review of all of my goals when there hasn’t been any progress on them… Or maybe I’m just tired of my goals… So… I’m going to change it up a bit here, and just review the goals that I’ve made progress on, or have something to report… Which isn’t much this month…

If you want to see a list of all my goals for 2015, you can check out my goals page.

Financial Goals

2. Savings/Planned Spending:
We got our new roof this month, so the home reno fund was successfully filled, and then drained… I’m sure we’ll get a new goal for the home reno fund soon enough, but until then we can concentrate on other savings…

Decluttering Week 9 – Bathroom Cabinets

I had to laugh when I wrote the title to this post… It is currently week 26 or 27 of the year, depending on how you choose to define week #1… but for the purpose of my decluttering tasks, I was putting 4 weeks per month, so week 9 was supposed to be the beginning of March… and here we are almost in July, what I would call week 24 or 25 of my tasks… yeah… whoops.

Anyway, the point is that clutter is being addressed, albeit slowly, and progress in decluttering and organizing is happening.  Also, please admire our very dated bathroom decor.  Isn’t it just beautiful?  The bathroom is high on my list of home renovation wishes… but it will take some time to save up that money in our home reno fund…

I mentioned a while back that I had been working on decluttering the bathroom cabinets and was planning on using the rules from Minimalist Sometimes‘ packing party for the process.  

May 2015 – Goals in Review

I can’t believe it is already June… I’m pretty sure I’ve said that at the beginning of all of my goals in review posts… It’s crazy how fast time seems to be flying by.

My goals posts always end up being really long, so I apologize in advance.  If you are just joining me on my journey to a better me, please check out my goals page for the list of my 2015 goals and links to the posts where I have explained them in detail.  But now, let’s get down to the review…

Productive Weekend

I am feeling a little bit better about things today… maybe I’m slowly getting out of my funk that I mentioned last week… I feel like my weekend was productive, and while not totally successful, it’s a step in the right direction.

Friday night, when I got home from my work trip, I had a bunch of girl friends over and we had a crafting party to get our wedding invites made.  We didn’t quite get them all completed, but with a bit more work on Saturday night, we were successful.  Now I just need to get them all addressed, and then I’ll put half in the mail, and the other half in my fiance’s backpack for bike delivery this week.

Saturday, I spent most of the day watching my fiance’s daughter play softball.  It was fun just to sit on my blanket on the grass and do nothing… quite relaxing.  Then, as I mentioned, we worked on the wedding invites and got them finished up.

Sunday morning I ran my half marathon.  I knew based on my training the past few weeks (or really lack of training), I was not going to make my 2 hour goal.  However, at the beginning of the race I gave myself two goals: