Goals

Goals Review and December Goals

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At the beginning of this year I made three goals for this year. They were to incur no new debt(other than student loans), improve my blogs, and to lose twenty pounds. The year isn’t over but I’m going to wrap up these goals now. The first goal was easily met and I don’t plan on incurring any new debt ever again. The second goal was also met. This goal is somewhat subjective but I have increased my readership on this blog from under 100 readers to occasionally over 300 readers. I’ve also increased my online income overall by an even bigger percentage. I feel it is fair to say that I’ve improved my blogs. The third goal will not be met. In fact I will most likely end up with negative progress on this one. With the holidays coming up I will likely gain weight rather than lose it. This goal will be revisited next year with a specific plan for losing weight.

I’ll be out of school for most of December so that is a great time to get stuff done. I’ll be setting a couple of goals for myself and hope to get more done than that. My first goal is to write an article a day for either Associated Content or eHow. That should give me a good idea of how much time I should spend writing for these sites in the future. My other goal is to build two static websites. I’ve had the ideas and the domain names for these websites for several months now but haven’t gotten around to building them. I don’t have time to start another blog but I’m hoping that once these sites are up they will produce a little income and rarely need to be updated. I’ll probably add to these goals before the month is over but I need to do these at the very least.

November Income Challenge Update

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My goal for November was to do something every day to make extra money.  I’ve already fallen behind but if I do two or three things some days I’ll be able to make an average of one a day.  Here are some things I’ve done so far to make extra money:

  • Opened checking account for Bank Bonus
  • Online Survey
  • Associated Content article
  • Brokered ING Direct links
  • Added Adsense back to this site
  • Medical Study
  • Opened bank cd
  • Invested in stock

Some of these things will be done on multiple days.  I won’t be doing thirty different things to make extra money.  The rest of the month I’ll be concentrating on writing articles for Associated Content and eHow.  It would be nice if I could estabish these as recurring sources of extra income.

August Goals Update

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Made some progress on my goals last month.  Listed below are the goals I set at the beginning of the year and the progress I’ve made on them.

  1. Don’t acquire any debt other than student loan debt.  I’ve met this goal but I have accumulated more student loan debt.
  2. Lose 20 pounds.  I haven’t done well on this one.  Earlier in the year I gained eight pounds and didn’t get back to my starting weight until July.  I only lost one pound in August.  I’ll have to lose nineteen pounds in the last four months of the year to meet this goal.
  3. Improve my blog.  This is somewhat subjective but I feel I’ve met this goal.  My readership has greatly increased since the beginning of the year.  Last month I installed a new theme and readership went up.  There will always be room to improve more though.

Overall, I’m doing okay on my goals but I need to keep working on them to avoid any setbacks.

July Goals Update

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I didn’t do a goals update for June because I was terrible about making progress towards my goals in June.  July was a much better month.  My first goal of not acquiring any new debt other than student loans is still being met.  This one is pretty easy to meet.  I made some progress towards my goal of losing 20 pounds.  After gaining 8 pounds earlier this year I’m now back to my original weight.  I’ll now need to lose 20 pounds in six months rather than a year.  This is doable but I’m going to have to put a lot more effort into it.  I did make good progress on improving my blog.  I started the Frugal Blog Network and I was featured twice on the Smart Spending blog at MSN.com.

Don't Wait Until You Retire

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There are a lot of things I want to accomplish that I don’t get done.  I tell myself that this is due to the time constraints imposed on me by school and my job but that isn’t entirely true.  A recent post at My Money Blog,  “The Depressing Truth About Early Retirement” helped me realize what I already knew. The post describes how early retirees have many things they want to accomplish thatthey don’t get done.  This makes them realize that it isn’t the job holding them back but a lack of motivation, organization, or discipline.

I have to admit those factors are what is holding me back.  If  I can’t get things done now, why would it be any different when I’m retired?  I can’t accomplish everything I want to while working but I can accomplish some things.  Right now I’m not getting much done at all.  I need to focus on getting some things accomplished now so I can continue and expand on that when I retire and have more time.  I’m considering a semi-retirement of sorts that would allow me to get stuff done and still earn money.  This would consist of working half the year and ratcheting up my frugality the rest of the year.  My future living plans that I was going to post about yesterday will be a key element in making the semi-retirement feasible. I promise  I’ll post about that on Monday.