Annual Goals 2020

It's been a year since we made our annual financial goals for 2019, and its time to check in on these and see how we did... and set goals for 2020!

We broke our goals up in three categories:

1. Things that don't cost us money
2. Things that cost us money
3. Long term goals

1. Be more purposefully with our spending. When I was going through what we spent in 2019 I didn't have any bad gut check reflexes that we spent too much or on the wrong stuff. I feel great about the purchase of our Subaru, even though it was a year earlier then planned, and made a mess of all of our other annual goals for the year. This is how I like to feel at the end of the year, not guilty about what we spent. Sure there were things we purchased last year that don't have a place in our home now, but we realized by buying a cheaper item, what we really needed to "get the job done," and then spent funds on that to make things easier. In terms of tracking our finances with more detail we ended up with more un-categorized receipts by the end of the year, but we also spent more money over all. I also added more categories to itemize, and with the year we had, i'm not going to beat myself up about it.

2. Replenishing our savings accounts (vacation, expansion of 6-month EF, new car fund), all of these were initially completed, and then we drained accounts to come up with an extra $10,000 to pay cash for our Subaru, a decision I don't regret one bit. Despite the bigger car, I get better gas mileage then I did in my old camry and we finally all fit in a car without feet kicking us. We were able to put back the money we "borrowed" from our Medical, Pup, and electronic accounts already, while cash flowing through the holidays... but we still need to put cash back into our expanded EF, and the vacation fund. We would have made more progress, but we took things one step further with my last raise and began regularly adding more money to our mortgage payment on a monthly basis, paying it down as if it were a 20 year mortgage, instead of a 30 year mortgage. We have a habit of doing this when we hit year two of a property, even though we aren't done with our renovation. As for 15% going to Retirement,  we kept this going strong and counted employer matches to get us there.

3. We had hoped to finish painting interior doors and trims, remove all of our tile, get our stuff into storage, to put in new flooring, and figure out how to fix the kitchen so that we could get a second pantry and more shelves and match all the doors.... take our stuff out of storage... build the rest of the built ins and install our base boards and paint them... But... since we cash flow repairs and realized the kitchen cabinet expansion would need to go in first before the floors, we got the tile out of the dinning room area, gave the kitchen a face-lift with a second pantry, floating shelves, swapped some cabinets for drawers, and put new doors on everything that are solid construction and easy to clean.  WE LOVE IT.... but that's all we got done this year because in the process of removing our tile, we noticed our bedroom carpet getting wet in the summer where our chair protector plastic mat was placed. After 2 plumbers came out and confirmed no slab leak, we had a few meetings with the HOA, and their lawyers.... and a geologist taking a walk through of our place..... The result is that our concrete might not be properly sealed, and the HOA lawyer has determined that this is their responsibility to fix... which means they may be on the hook to rip out all of our flooring at their expense, and seal the concrete. We would then file a homeowners claim on our insurance to replace our baseboards and flooring.  SO, due to this discovery, we stopped ripping out our own flooring after this was reported in June to our HOA...

So what are we going to do in 2020??? Well, A LOT  

I'm determined to actually finish the first 6 things by summer... and i'm a motivated gal right now, because the finish line is practically here.  So here's hoping for a smooth process.

1. Put all of our savings accounts we borrowed from back. 
1. Emergency Fund: $5,175
2. Vacation: $1500
1. We sold some of my extra PTO hours back in January, and we have an extra paycheck week in January as well, so we are hoping to do some serious denting on these numbers by the end of the month.
2. Tax returns are coming around the corner, and I think we are on par for a refund based on my initial numbers, which will help, and hopefully get these back and stocked up before profit share time.
2. Begin saving money up again to replace Hub's car once initial funds are set up. We hope to do 10,000 a year for 3 years so he can get something he will have for the next 10 years. We won't get 10k this year, but we will start it back up, with the idea that in 4 years, his car is replaced. 
3. Finish painting the interior doors before new flooring goes in, cause its easier to do now when we know all the flooring is getting ripped up...
4. Get our concrete floors sealed, and figure out what I have to do to file a homeowners claim for new floors... Which means eventually moving all of our stuff out into storage since we don't have a garage, getting the floors sealed... and then navigating install of new flooring through my homeowners policy... and getting all of our stuff back from storage... and you know... hopefully staying in our condo while all this takes place.
5. Purchase living room built ins and install them on new flooring, which is our last inside project!
6. Do baseboards if home policy won't cover their install... and paint them.

After those goals are done, we plan to do the following to set us up well for our futures:

1. Jack up retirement to 15% without counting matches. 
1. How are we going to do this? We will be done paying for preschool/daycare in September. Little dude starts Kindergarten at the public school and the city runs a low cost after school program on campus until 4:30 or 4:45, when Hubs will pick him up... which means we only have to manage summer camps now!
2. Jack up the mortgage repayment to equal a "15 year" loan when we are done paying for Preschool.
1. This place isn't our forever home, that one will include space to garden and a garage... so we want to pay down our loan for the increased equity. 
2. That way when we sell, we can roll over the money to help pay for another home. We hope our next purchase will be our last... but depending on where we want to retire, it might not be. But we are hopeful that we will be able to move when we can still enjoy our time in the place and hopefully have around 10 years there to make the buy/sell worth it. SO paying it down now, we give us more flexibility and a 4% return, which is better then we would get parking funds in a savings account.