Personal goals

Attaining personal and financial goals need benchmarks. Benchmarks are a means of evaluating if the progress made towards the goals are in track. I am going to write down my personal goals in this post and going to track them once every month or so to check where I am headed.

FINANCIAL GOALS:

1) Increase our networth by $50,000 by end of year 2008 : With us being a 2 income family and no kids [don't know what would be the status by end of 2008 ], I think this goal is achievable. To brief our current financial picture, we bought a condo in the very recent past. We have two mortgages (80-10). Also we have no money invested for our retirement. No money invested for any future education for me and my husband. So we are pretty much at our starting line. For the past month or so, I have been reading some personal finance blogs. These have helped us to analyze our monthly expenses. We have come up with a list of ‘needs’. We have also started to save some money in a high yield savings account. I will write in more detail about these in my next post.

2) Learn about investing in Stocks : My goal for the year after should potentially include investing in stocks. So I will be spending some time learning about stocks and the investment strategies during this year. So when we have enough money stocked up for our emergency funds and some portion of our loans paid off, we should be informed enough to get our legs wet in the stock market.

3) Invest in Roth IRA : I am very sure that we would not qualify for next year’s Roth IRA investment. About half of this year I was not employed. This would definitely make us eligible for Roth IRA this year and I am doing it to the full extent.

NON-FINANCIAL GOALS:

1) Find a new job : The job I currently have is good. It pays good. But I don’t seem to be motivated. I need to find a job that is more challenging. I will work on my resume and find a new challenging job.

2) Exercise : Before buying our new place, we always lived in an apartment complex that had a fitness center. It was a fairly important factor when we looked for a rental. Truth be said, we probably used it 10% of the time that we intended to use. I think we set ourselves to fail even before we started. We did not build our exercise routines slowly. We jumped into it with a goal of hitting the gym 5 days a week. The building we currently occupy will be opening a fitness center facility soon. But I am going to find a gym close to our home and use it once during the week(Saturdays). We will increase the usage when we are comfortable with this routine.

There I have set it out. I have never set any goals until today. I was convinced that setting goals is setting ourselves for failure. I have told my friends that if we really wanted to do it, we wouldn’t need goals. But I see that the older method did no good for us. I am willing to try this method. I will be happy to accept my fault if these goals help us.