2016 Goals #7, #8, #9 & #10

As I  mentioned in my last post, I’ve messed up my categorization of my goals for 2016 (compared to 2015), so this post will have the rest of my random personal goals for 2016.

Over the holidays, my sister shared this article with me:  If you’re 30% through your life, you’re likely 90% through your best relationships.  Though I followed the links there and found the original post here: The Tail End.

I found the article interesting, and eye opening, and the graphics were pretty mind-boggling.  If you don’t want to go over there and read the article, basically it is laying out visually, the amount of months, weeks or days that are contained in a 90 year life.  And it has fun by looking at your life in terms of other events, like number of US presidents or Superbowls or swims in the ocean…

But then it goes on to discuss how the 34 year old author only has about 300 days total left with his 60 year old parents (assuming they live until 90 and he continues with the approximate 10 days a year), which compared to the amount from his youth is only about 5% of his total in-person parent time left.  That doesn’t sound like much, does it?

Similarly, he discusses the amount of time left with his sisters (about 15%) and with his high school buddies (about 7%)… It’s an interesting concept to think about, and it got me wondering… How much time do I have left with my family and friends?  Am I making the best of it?

As I was thinking about that, I got to thinking about the different relationships with members of my extended family.  I have a coworker who is best-friends with her cousin, and they were each other’s maid of honour at their weddings.  (I guess technically, one was a matron, since one was married before the other.)  I live in the same city as most of my cousins, but I barely know them and don’t see them other than at large family functions.  To be fair, my coworker is the same age as her cousin, and the closest cousin to me in age is 8 years older than me and the next is 12 years younger than me… but still…

Anyway, this thinking has brought me to decide on my focus for 2016, which is relationships.  I want to nurture and grow my relationships, with a focus on my family and my longtime friends.  The ones that I may be in the “tail-end” of our time together. So I made two goals for 2016 relating to that:

Advertisement

2016 Goals #3, #4, #5 & #6 – Financial Goals

I sort of messed up my format for posting and discussing my goals for 2016… I started with 2 overall sort of goals that sort of encompass many categories of goals… and were related to others… which then of course meant that I didn’t categorize my goals like I did for 2015… So, now that I want to post about my 4 financial goals for 2016, I guess I’ll just continue with my goal numbering that I did in my last two posts.  (I think this is why people do blog post planning and such… )

My first financial goal of 2015 was to make and stick to a budget, and while I could lump it in here with the financial goals for 2016, I already discussed this with the habits that I am working on, so I’m going to leave it as part of that.

Goal #3 – Emergency Fund at $10,000

This one is sort of left over from last year… I had originally thought I’d get our emergency fund up to $10,000 last year, but I had is as a sort of bonus stretch goal for the year.  With it currently sitting at $2500, we need to save an additional $7500 this year to get it up to the $10,000 goal.  Totally doable… I think… Unfortunately, I may have to hit up the emergency fund for some expenses in the next month… which I will discuss in another post…

Goal #4 – Save for Planned Spending

2016 is already looking like a very busy year.  We have lots of travel planned, big ideas for home improvements, along with some required maintenance, and are considering getting a dog… We don’t want to go in to debt for any of these things if we can avoid it, so that means saving up… lots!  So, in a format that is loosely based of Kate from Goodnight Debt‘s savings goals (baby, middle, thing 1, thing 2, etc…) I have put together this list:

2016 Goal #2: Master Good Habits

On Tuesday I discussed goal #1 for 2016, which is to get organized with my bullet journal… it’s a work in progress… but that’s sort of the concept of the bullet journal… work at it until you find what works best for you… so I’ll have to post an update in a while once I’ve had more time to work through the kinks.

I had so many ideas for goals or things I want to accomplish, it was sort of overwhelming when I was brainstorming… but it is silly to try and get everything done at once, so I needed to pare down.  So, for goal #2 for 2016, I decided that I would start with a few specific habits to work on in January, and then each month I will add more based on the successes of the previous month.  Mastering these habits will help me have a good basis for completing other goals.

I’ve already shown you my habit tracker from my bullet journal on Tuesday, but I didn’t go in to any details about what habits were actually being tracked… so I’ll do that now.

Here is my January habit tracker in my bullet journal that I posted on Tuesday:

January Habit Tracker

And here is an updated close-up from yesterday:

January Habit Tracker Close-Up

I have selected 7 habits for January that are mostly attached to bigger goals, but are smaller tasks that I can work on…

1. Morning Routine (5:30am)

Last summer, I put together a morning routine or schedule in an attempt to get myself organized.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have any way to record how often I was doing it, and zero accountability, and I totally let it fall to the side.  So, with the help of my bullet journal, I’m going to try get up at 5:30am every morning and do the morning routine every morning.  Well, not Saturday and Sunday… those are my sleep in days.  So far, I haven’t done a full morning routine, but I did partial routines some mornings… Or I did get up at 5:30am, but I didn’t do a part of the routine… I have indicated that with a half filled box.

2016 Goal #1: Get Organized

Happy New Year!

It’s that time of year where most of us are sitting down and making plans for the new year.  And I’m no different.  Last year I had already made all my goals for the new year before it arrived, but this year I was a bit slower… I’ve been debating on how I want to move forward with my goals and if I want to continue with some of the more basic habit based ones from last year, or if I want to just go for new goals only… Lots of humming and hawing… I think I’ve sorted it out now…

My 2016 Goals Brainstorming

But before I can do any of my goals, I need to get organized.  I need to have a place to keep track of my goals, my to-do lists, and whatever else I have going on… I had a notebook that I was sort of using for this over the past year, but I was so rigid on what I could put in it and I didn’t just let myself have fun with it, so it didn’t stick very well.  And I didn’t use it to plan… just to record (my failures)…

Enter Bullet Journaling.

Yup, I have started bullet journaling.  If you haven’t heard of it, it may just change your life… like seriously.  Like more than Marie Kondo’s method of tidying up (sorry Marie).  (I have seen a lot of posts of people using their bullet journal to declutter with the KonMari method though…)  Anyway, I had heard of bullet journaling before, but it wasn’t until ShyWriter over at writerstyle.wordpress.com posted about her plan to use a bullet journal in 2016 that I really dug in to it.  And I have been Instagraming and Pinteresting all sorts of bullet journal fun.  You can check out the original bullet journal concept at bulletjournal.com, but that’s just the basics… Look up the hashtag #bulletjournal or #bujo on Instagram and you’ll find some crazy artistic takes on what you can do with bullet journalling.

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.

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…

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…

March 2015 – Goals in Review

I can’t believe March is already done… And Easter is this weekend. I am excited for the long weekend, but will probably spend most of it catching up on my studying… Lame, I know…

March was pretty much a failure on the goals front.  I didn’t do much on my goals this month… like nothing.  So this review won’t have much progress to report. I was definitely feeling the March “blahs”… Most goals are still at the same place where they were at the end of February, but none the less, here it is:

February 2015 – Goals in Review

Another month of 2015 done, so it is once again time to review the goals I have for the year and see how I’m doing…  These reviews are a little wordy sometimes, so sorry about that… but it really helps me to see all the goals in one place and review them all…

Mid-February Procrastination

I’m not sure if I really need to do a formal review of my goals again… I just published one a few weeks ago, but I want to use this blog for accountability, and for working out what is or isn’t working, and things definitely weren’t working last week…

I could make excuses that being sick and the holiday Monday totally messed with my schedule, but I also wasted time and basically wasn’t productive when I should have been… nearing the end of last week, I told myself I would get on track on the weekend… and that didn’t happen… so of course, I told myself that this week would be better, and so far it hasn’t started out so well.