My financial life for the past couple years has been really focused on accumulating as much cash as possible for the house purchase. While I saved, invested and paid down debt my real focus was cash. With the new house paid for that part of my life is over right now, and it feels ridiculous throwing money in a savings account that is paying me next to nothing when I don’t have a serious liquidity need anytime soon. Like I told myself years ago (since no one else was reading at that point) you have to know thyself to overcome your shortcomings and one of my shortcomings is that I have the attention span of a gnat. I feel myself starting to lose focus on my finances.
For me, I have to see change or I get bored. It is probably the reason:
- I kept spreadsheets of my debt going down for the first 2 years of this blog
- I check the market 22 times a day
- I will send stupid amounts of money to my debt instead of just saving up a normal amount before sending it in
- I keep track of my net worth every month
- Hell it is probably the reason I have a personal finance blog!
Creating Short Term Saving and Investing Financial Goals
My plan is to have a short term, 3 to 6 month, goals for my saving/investing/debt repayment. These goals will hopefully change often as I meet them! My first four, in order:
- Deposit $3,000 to my dividend investment fund
- Get my Home improvement fund up to $1,000
- Pay $500 towards my student loan principal
- Save $500 in my Son’s 529 Plan
This $5,000 worth of goals may take me a month or may take me 6 months it all has to do with how much I can earn, not spend in a month and how much I decide to send to my 0% credit card. I am already excited for the challenge! As always, accountability is key so I will keep the progress bars on the sidebar of my site at all times.
I’m a lot like you. It’s so much easier for me to stay on track when I force myself to stay focused on whatever it is. Constantly checking my multiple financial spreadsheets is probably overkill for most people, heck even for me, but it’s getting the job done. My expenses continue to drift downward thanks to keeping track and my net worth has increased all but 3 months in just under 3 years. Best of luck getting those goals scratched off earlier than expected.
I love the idea of breaking your goals down in $5k increments. I think I’m going to use this strategy to kick start my debt repayment progress again!