Since it’s nearly the end of the year, I decided to do a progress report on my goals for this year. I know it’s typical to do this at the very end of the year, but I think I’m away around then so I may as well do it now.
The other reason for doing it now, is that I’ve already achieved all the goals I’d set! YESSSS!! I am really happy about this, as in the past, I had a bit of difficulty in setting financial goals, and then working towards them, let alone achieve any goals. What a complete turnaround to be in the situation where I have actually managed to achieve every single one of my financial goals! This pleases me greatly, to say the least! I think it’s also going to be helpful in planning and communication about finances with my husband, since we got into a little argument last night about planning and tracking expenses, which I’ve been discussing here with our good friend from Dividend Life. Yet, I’d bet my bottom dollar, that if I can show my spouse this progress report, he will be super pleased!
As a quick reminder, these are (were!) the goals:
Goals for 2014:
To earn at least £50 in dividend income (2013 was £26)ACHIEVED 3rd DEC!! – CUTTING IT FINE, M!To re-mortgage to a cheaper deal (currently on BBR+1.69%)To save more per month and put into dividend shares (target to beat £100pm) managed £1615 as of August 25th 2014, and still have four months to go ’til the end of the year, yay!To save money for Christmas by October (£175 for gifts, £200 for food and petrol to visit family)To save 6+ months in emergency fund
I’m really so pleased about this (can you tell?!). I used to be really crap at setting financial goals, staying motivated, and achieving goals. I managed to formulate a plan to counteract this though, which this blog has actually helped me to keep up with, since it means I am regularly thinking about things, writing them down, tracking everything in more detail and so on.
So, I guess I might just go and adjust my goals for next year to push myself a bit more. Of course, sometimes things come up and you just can’t always save as much as you’d hoped. We save money into a “household fund”, which we use to pay for repairs and suchlike, so that goes some way to counterbalancing anything that we might need to suddenly shell out for. For example, a tree near our house sucked up all the groundwater during one of our frequent droughts, thus causing cracks in the East wall of our house, as it sent its roots further in the search for water. We had to have the tree cut down, the wall reinforced with metal bars, and the mortar re-pointed. That was around £1200 or something, but thankfully our household fund was able to cover most of that, with two future months’ household fund payments covering the rest. Because we did not want to touch our emergency fund, we waited a bit to do the work. We also had to do it when it was good weather, so there was some time between when the tree was cut down and when the wall was repaired and reinforced.
I am really looking forward to setting financial goals for 2015 after this year’s success. I am also hoping that I can do it jointly with my husband, as a nice exercise in planning. Hopefully this will give us lots of ‘little wins’ to look forward to over the coming months 
How is everyone else doing against their annual goals? Are you going to be able to tick them all off, or have you managed to complete them already?! Let me know, leave a comment!
Hi M,
Great job on exceeding your goals! I think it’s great that you resisted reaching into your emergency fund for the wall repair too – I’m a big believer of defining clear purposes for an emergency fund so that you can rely on it being there when those emergencies occur.
A small plastic shed in our garden collapsed due to high wind while we were away so we have that to repair / replace and our garden sprinkler system was damaged by cold weather which will need to be repaired in the spring. I forget the recommended amount to put aside for house repairs that I read somewhere – a couple of percent of the house price I think, so I should probably increase the $57 a month I currently put aside!
Anyway, I hope your husband appreciated the progress report – it’s definitely worth a celebration or two!
Best wishes,
-DL
Dividend Life recently posted…My recent UK trip – did we stay on budget?
Hey man, thanks. I also believe in being purposeful about things like emergency funds… and basically everything – hence the tagline of this site.
I heard that you should put aside 1-2% of the purchase price of the house every year for maintenance costs. That is something we are definitely NOT doing! That’d be something like £280 per month. I think give the high costs of housing in the UK, I could probably get away with about 0.75% which is around £180 per month. This is closer to being affordable… and a quick check of my budget shows that is coincidentally the exact amount we put aside each month for the house. We allow ourselves to spend up to £40 of it on a monthly basis for small household things like new doormats etc. and the rest (£140) goes into a joint savings account every month. We paid for the wall repairs out of this fund.
And great news, my husband loved the progress report and was really happy about it. I am hoping to build on this ‘little win’ to make our 2015 plans together in a clearer way. Of course, he should just read my blog more often! HA!
Thanks for stopping by, as always,
Cheers!
Congrats on hitting your goals, TV. Looks like a solid start to your path to financial independence and start of dividend income. Wishing you the best for 2015
cheers
R2R
Roadmap2Retire recently posted…Alternative Investments – Private Equity
R2R,
thanks so much for visiting. And thanks for the encouragement! We are starting small, because we have money allocated to pensions – but we don’t want to rely solely on them! Like you have written about, we want to have various streams of passive income, so dividends are just one of those.
I wish you the best for Christmas and the New Year!
Cheers