2018 Financial Goals

It's a new year and a good time to check in on our finances and set some goals. Reviewing where you are, where you have been, and where you want to go can make living a leaner lifestyle a little easier to manage.

We all live frugally for a reason. It may be to pay down debt, save money for a large purchase such as a car or a down payment on a home... or it could be for something greater, like reducing your expenses to allow a career change, to become a stay at home parent, or to just afford daycare and a growing family.

Whatever your reason for building a budget and sticking to it, goals can help you keep your eye on the prize and help you make priorities with any windfalls that may come your way. The finish line might be hundreds of thousands of dollars and many years down the road... and it may seem unattainable on the grand scale... but tackling things on a yearly basis and setting annual benchmarks can break it down and make it more manageable.

There's also something satisfying about achieving a goal, no matter how small.  Over time, achieving smaller goals can help keep your focus on the large picture. I mean come on, we could all use some  "wins" in the motivation column.

So with that, it's time to take a look at where we've been and where we want to go.

Goals for 2018

1. Be more purposefully with our spending - The less time I spend in stores, the more money stays in our bank account, so for 2018, I want to be more purposeful in how we part with our income. I want to make sure hubs and I ask the question, "what line item is this coming out of..." before we make a purchase, instead of me making it work afterwards or declaring a "no more spending" decree mid month. By doing this it will make sure we are communicating together and not just impulsing our way through stores.
2. Track our finances with more detail - I used to keep track of everything we spent with more detail then I currently do (More than just categories, but itemized categories)... and  I want to go back to actually knowing what our "discretionary" purchases are at the end of the year instead of marking them "walmart" "target" and "amazon" followed by a bunch of question marks because i'm too lazy to itemize receipts... Sure I know what the purchases were that month, but by December, I couldn't tell you if they were computer items, legos, house supplies, etc.  
3. Replenish our savings accounts- in an effort to make sure our home improvement fund stayed for home improvement, we ended up dipping into a lot of our savings accounts to cover car repairs, and take care of hubs dental bills towards the end of last year. Normally we just cash flow a lot of things and don't touch the savings accounts, but since we don't know what a lot of our pending projects will cost, we have been uber conservative and have been doing projects one at a time.. so towards the end of the year, we used our slush fund to cover expenses and pulled items out of their extended savings account. 
1. Roxy Fund - We keep $1k in a savings account as a pet emergency fund... We almost have this back up, but need to add $37.76 to the account. Hoping this will happen by the end of January.
2. Medical Fund - We normally keep $1k in an account to cover co-pays, and expenses we can't cash flow if we have a tight budget month... we emptied it completely last year...
3. Vacation Fund - We keep $1500 in an account in case we need to unexpectedly travel and it also allows for us to do at least one trip out to Utah to visit family each year.  We need to add $628.51 to get it back to its normal since we didn't cash flow our trip to Utah this year. 
4. Clean up some savings accounts - I have a lot of savings accounts, and i'm going to begin merging a few to make it a little easier on myself. I'm going to keep just one account for automobiles. I currently have 3 (one for car registration and smog... another for car repairs.... and another for our future replacement cars...) Only problem is I keep raiding the new car fund when the repair fund comes up dry, and its just annoying. Simplifying the accounts down to one will make it a bit cleaner for me to organize... which reminds me that I also need to change my car registration with the DMV....
5. Finish the rest of the home improvement projects.
1. I need to paint our ceiling and sand it
2. I need to paint our living room / kitchen / dinning room area.
3. I need to get the rest of our bedroom closet purchased, built and assembled...
4. We need to replace interior and exterior doors
5. Then I need to paint doors and trims....
6. We need to put in new flooring
7. Then I need to install baseboards.
8. After that, we can purchase the built ins for the living room... assemble and install them...  and then
9. Finally unpack the rest of the boxes in the house.
6. Maintain at least 15% of our income going towards retirement. I think we are about 15-17 percent depending on matches at the moment, but i'll run some numbers after we get a couple of paychecks for January and adjust as needed. 
7. Spend less money on stuff (outside of the reno) then we did last year.  At least with the categories we can control...