2019 Goals The Review

I love setting goals. Setting goals provide guidance, accountability, and eventually helps me reach important milestones in my life. Goals are highly important to me and I perform better with them.

Over time, I have built confidence in myself by creating goals and living up to them. It even taught me to respect myself more as I began to take my own words and promises seriously.

It’s a practice and ritual to improve self-confidence, self-worth, and boost happiness.

Here are my goals I set back in early 2019. Time to review and reflect on them!

 

 

Long term goals are always on top as the short term are placed on the bottom. This year I have accomplished 7 goals out of 11! Here are the details.

 

The chart above is my actual net worth recorded since 2008. This year my net worth has increased 10.1%. Looking where the growth came from, all cash holdings/investments grew by 26.7%. My hard assets such as real estate and others increased by 4.4%.

 

The LBF dividend portfolio is a little over a year old and the results show I am 58% completed towards my goal of $10,000 in annual dividends. In 2019, the portfolio has generated a total of $5,840.91 in dividends. That averages to $486.74 per month in dividend income. In perspective, the dividends have covered the following expenses for the year of 2019.

That’s all utilities and quite a bit of my living expenses. What I am really striving for is the day when this portfolio covers ALL living expenses.

 

I took this goal slow and steady for the year. Not much additional investments have been made here due to focus on other goals like the dividend portfolio. In total, I have invested an additional $3,504.45 into Fundrise. $1,500 was invested into the real estate portfolios and an additional $2,004.45 into the iPO (internet Public Offering). The real estate part of the portfolio has returned about 8.9% for the year with the iPO returning 17.5%.

 

The plan was to slowly build a separate fund to use towards a replacement car for the 20 year old car. Due to its age, I figured it’s about time to get started. I shifted about $300 to $500 each month towards a high yielding savings vehicle. My original goal was $10,000 but thanks to the stock market in 2019, I decided to take some profits while re-balancing the portfolio. That added an additional $10,000 to the car fund! Thanks to the stock market! 😊

 

This one is a big one for me. I saved ZIP! However, I am constantly scheming and strategizing on how I will accomplish this goal. I figured the total I would need for the trip would come out to at minimum $82,360. Some locations I plan on visiting have low cost of living, so that has been factored into the estimation.

My plans are to begin saving for the goal once my NW/vacation ratio is near the 2% mark. A net worth of $5,000,000 would be a nice target where I would feel comfortable spending such an amount on a vacation of this length.

 

This is a super important one for me. The status for this goal is stated as in progress because I realized this goal is a lifetime task. However, I marked this goal as complete because I do feel I put in a good amount of effort this year.

 

Not including the posts this year, I still have an additional 107 pages/37,281 words written. Writing is still hard for me but after reading some of my older posts I can safely say I did learn a lot. More so than I would have ever imagined. Writing is an art in its own unique way. An art that requires time to improve upon. I’m optimistic I can improve if I continue to write my thoughts out.

The goal was marked complete but the status shows in progress since this may be a lifetime of learning.

 

I did it! 5.8 average posts per month for the year of 2019! This goal was unexpectedly fun to achieve. Sharing my journey with the FIRE community has been an humbling experience. Thank you to those who wrote in telling me how helpful some of my posts were. To have an outlet to share what I have learned with my cousins and friends was one of the main purposes of this site. My only hopes for this site going forward is to inspire those who have not began investing to get started.

 

My average emergency funds for the year prior was in the $12,000. This year I have brought that up to $15,000. The goal is to maintain an emergency fund between 6 to 8 months of expenses.

 

For the first time in my life, I have purchased umbrella insurance. Details can be found here.

 

All my life, I wanted to visit Yellowstone. I finally got that off my bucket list. We took a road trip for 10 days visiting Yellowstone, Grand Tetons, Salt Lake City, Zion National Park, and finally Las Vegas. Details on the costs and trip can be found here.

So, that wraps up the year. I’m quite happy with my progress with my goals. Documentation of your progress is a powerful motivator. How you set and track them is not important. What’s important is the effort and progress you make.

On with those 2020 goals! I will share them once I have completed them. 😊 Happy 2020!