2010 Goals Wrap-Up

Debt Freedom

1. Refresh financial goals by going through the 13-week Financial Peace Home Study again.  Target for completion: April 2010.

   SUCCESS! We did this one right on time, completing Financial Peace Home Study with Tasha and our friend Kanika.

2. Secure debt freedom by paying off my final student loan.  Target for completion: September 2010.

   SUCCESS! This is the one I’m most proud of: we are DEBT FREE except for the house, and we got there on March 31st (way ahead of our September target).  You can read more at the link on our reflections after achieving this monumental target, but I would like to take a moment to thank Dave Hickman for giving us The Total Money Makeover book when he saw my goal to pay off credit card debt way back in 2006.

3. Begin on full emergency fund of 3-6 months of expenses, saving at least two months of expenses by year end.  Target for completion: December 2010.

   FAILURE! (Kinda) Thanks to a certain special addition to our family, we didn’t quite make as much progress on this as we had hoped.  Right now we’re sitting right around one month of expenses, but this one is going to rate high on the goal chart in the coming year.

4. Continue keeping grocery budget records.  Target for completion: December 2010.

   FAILURE! This one also became difficult with the new addition… and we got lazy.  I kept many of the receipts for 2010, staying diligent through June but at this point I don’t care enough about tracking this to slog through 6 months of receipts.  I plan to track this in 2011, but it’ll fall short of being on the goal list since we’ve kept a fairly good handle on our food budget.

Personal Development and Recreation

1. Increase karate workouts, averaging twice a week at a minimum. Target for completion: December 2010.

   FAILURE! Only made 53 workouts last year, I aim to do better this year.

1. Complete TotallyGuitars.com‘s Acoustic Genius series. Target for completion: December 2010.

   FAILURE! (Kinda) I made it a fair way through the Acoustic Genius series, and then I got distracted on other songs and guitar stuff… there was too much information on the site to remain focused.  I have been playing a lot more often, which was the intent of the goal but in black-and-white terms this is still a failure.

2. Create a “man cave” for myself in the basement. Target for completion: June 2010.

   SUCCESS! (Kinda) The furthest I got on this goal was clearing out the basement and setting up a small area to relax.  After July, however… the basement became a dumping ground for boxes of stuff displaced from the office, which will become a nursery in March.

3. Daily blogging this year, metrics remaining the same as last year. Target for completion: December 2010.

   FAILURE!  (Kinda) I missed 6 days of blogging this year, usually due to not paying close attention to the time.  I made 375 total posts throughout the year, taking the grand total to 2,903 as of this writing.  Another interesting metric thanks to the WP Word Count plugin: my blog contains 587,300 words.  Using National Novel Writing Month standards of 50,000 words, that’s 11.74 novels from a word count perspective.  Notice how I do not compare myself directly to actual writers here, merely using word count to put some context around that number.So despite the fact that I once again failed to blog every day this year, there’s still some good stuff going on here.

That about wraps up 2010!  I don’t like seeing so many failures in that list, but I am comforted by the fact that many are just partials.  Stay tuned for my 2011 goals soon.  Here’s a preview: there’s likely to be fewer. 🙂