As a follow up to yesterday’s post on my personal goals for 2008, I felt it was appropriate to list my financial goals for 2008 (since this is a financial blog!).
1. Pay off our car early. My wife and I have been living with one car for almost a full year. Not making insurance payments or paying for maintenance has given us extra money to pay towards the one car we have. So by August we should have our car paid off, almost a full year early.
2. Achieve secondary income. I hope that eventually this blog gains enough readers to sell add space, at which point it will be another source of income. Short of getting a second job, I am unsure what else I could do.
3. Begin credit card payoff mode. Right now we are using the debt snowball method, which means we put all of our extra money towards paying off our lowest debt (the car). Once that is done we will begin paying down our credit cards, each of which are in the low 5-figures. By the end of the year I don’t think it’s unreasonable to have one card at least half-way paid off.
4. Contribute to an education fund. I plan on returning to school for a Masters in Business, which requires money for tuition. So by the fall quarter I will need about $1500 to cover tuition and books. By the end of the year I will need another $1500 to pay for the winter quarter. I should be able to save at least part of this due to a budgeting quark – I budget monthly, but get paid biweekly. This means I get two extra paychecks a year. That will cover some of the education fund, but I will need to budget in money monthly as well.
6. Build up a variable expense fund. It is ideal to have at least a small emergency fund available of about $1000, which we are close to having. After that though, I would like to start a second account which we can use to pay for things like our car and renters insurance, car maintenance costs that pop up, or other small expenses that occur that are not true emergencies.
Most of these goals are fairly easily attainable. Achieving secondary income from this blog will require some writing skills, which I will need to work on. I guess if I had a stretch goal, it would be to pay off at least one credit card by the end of the year. It might be possible, but with changes like going back to school it will be tough to accomplish.
