Goals for 2013?

[cougs4bcs]

Well, it's that time of year again. What are your financial goals for this year?

Mine:
- Continue working at same job and make over 50k gross. I get paid a base salary and there is a good system in place to make a good amount of money in bonus/commission.
- Purchase a new car (well... used!). The vehicle I'm driving now is getting closer and closer to 300k miles and while I love not having a car payment, I'm ready for an upgrade. I love the car, but I want something with 50k miles or less that is a bit more attractive/fun/reliable. I plan on putting over 5k down in order to keep my loan amount as small as possible.
- Keep working on building my credit. I want to get a better score before I purchase my new car to get as good of a rate as I can. Also want to buy a house in quite a few years, but why not start getting decent credit now?
- Fully fund my 2012 and 2013 Roth contributions. Not much to explain here.
- If I complete all these goals, I'd be 100% happy. Though there is always more room for improvement! After all these, I would probably try to up my emergency fund by a few thousand. Right now it is at 8k and with a new car, I'd have to increase that to feel comfortable since my monthly expenses would increase. After that, I honestly don't know what else I'd do. Probably just stack my cash and enjoy life?


So what are all of your goals? Be as detailed as you'd like!

[humandraydel]

Probably just stack my cash and enjoy life?

Best quote ever. Honestly, that's the best you can do - live within your means and enjoy and be grateful for what you DO have.

My goals for 2013 are essentially the aforementioned stacking of cash I'm pretty much on auto pilot.

[sweetlady2k]

I want to get an emergency fund started I am also saving for a cross country move in 18 months or so. I will need at least my half of 10k for that so 5k. Bf has already saved almost 3k for his half so I need to get mine going. I also am saving for christmas this year was the 2nd year I had it all saved ahead of time and it is a huge stress reliever!

[bjl584]

Just to continue paying down my student loans while saving and investing. Pretty simple.

[MonkeyMama]

The milestone we intend to cross this year is to have more cash/mutual fund/stock assets than debts (mortgage). I think this is an exciting milestone! Since the stock market did so well yesterday, we only have about $10k to go.

In that vein, we will max out our ROTHs, save up some cash, and ideally pay more principal than interest on our mortgage this year.

[twest]

My Goals

Some of the bloggers on the site have inspired me to do a snowflake challenge so I will be stocking up any cash possible to pay off my husband's motorcycle he had to buy in 2012.

We are going to Disney World this year so we are going to be saving for that. (I am shooting for 4000 but that sounds so high compared to any other vacation we have taken so not sure on that....hoping we don't have to spend quite that much)

Fully Fund Roth for 2012 and 2013

Lastly I am going to try and add 2000 - 3000 to our emergency fund. This one may not happen but if not it will definitely be first priority in 2014. We already have a good 5 months saved so not too worry if it doesn't happen.

[disneysteve]

We are going to Disney World this year so we are going to be saving for that. (I am shooting for 4000 but that sounds so high compared to any other vacation we have taken so not sure on that....hoping we don't have to spend quite that much)

How many of you are there? The 3 of us do a week in Disney World every year for under $2,500 and we could probably trim that to $2,000 if we really needed to. If you need advice, just PM me.

[disneysteve]

I'm not a big goal-setter. Things are pretty much on auto-pilot as far as investing is concerned. The only tweak this year will be to add an extra $1,000 to our Roths to take advantage of the increased limit.

I suspect we will be replacing my wife's van this year so that will be a big hit to the savings. We replaced my car in 2012 and I've got that almost half paid off. I'd like to finish that before we buy the next one.

Otherwise, I'm more focused on non-financial things. Our daughter will enter her senior year of high school this year. The college search has already begun as has the SAT prep course. I know there will be various new expenses like campus visits, application fees, etc. but I think we are prepared for all of that.

[kork13]

Things for me are mostly on "autopilot," but there are a few things I want to do financially this year:
- Stabilize. I had alot of major changes to my financial life in 2012 -- significant promotion, training for a new job, trans-oceanic move, bought a house, bought a car, new retirement plan option (Roth TSP -- woot!), a variety of tax changes (both occurred and expected), and so on... So with all of that happening within about the last 4 months, things still haven't quite leveled out yet. I'm looking forward to when everything settles back into some sort of normalcy.
- Beyond that, my biggest goal for 2013: Increase my EF to a full 6 months' expenses ($25k). I've previously only kept 4 months ($15k at the time), but with everything that took place for me last year and higher overall expenses, I'm no longer comfortable with just 4 months. I'm planning to put any spare cash into my EF while still maintaining my normal savings plans. So my tax refund (expecting it to be abnormally high this year, around $1k-$2k) is going straight to the EF, along with any other unexpected cash (gifts, monthly excess, etc.). I have about $7k left to add, so I may not quite make it this year, but we'll see.
- Max my Roth IRA (already set up for bi-monthly DCA, so this is sort of a gimme)
- Pay down my car loan by 50%. It's already accelerated on a 3-yr term, and I'm making extra principle payments to pay it down even faster. At my current pace of automated payments, this should also be a gimme.

It's weird, but looking at this, and knowing my monthly finances as I do, it honestly makes me feel a little stretched... Because especially for the EF, it really is a bit of a lofty goal for me. There's about $1500 for my EF goal that I don't yet have a plan for where it'll come from. We've had this discussion before, but I still sometimes feel like I'm living "paycheck-to-paycheck" and "just scraping by" in order to meet my obligations, meet my savings goals, and still have fun day to day.... in spite of saving nearly 30% of my income each month.

[breathemusic]

-Pay off 2 of my 3 student loans and cut the 3rd down substantially
-Continue to build my savings toward an eventual house downpayment
-get back to packing lunches and better meal planning to cut down my grocery bill
-Up my retirement contribution (2012 was 10% plus a $5k roth IRA)

[Like2Plan]

2012 was a tough year for us. One of the two biggest emotional events was DS graduating college and (mostly) moving out 2 states away. He is living his dream, but we miss him. We liquidated our 529 accounts (they were pretty close to zero.)

The second event was DH changed jobs in July, but the new job did not pan out as expected. It took until Nov for DH to get his first pay-slip. (There had been issues just geting paid at all and no regular paydays) After getting the payslips, it became clear they were not paying him his full salary and they had not set up his 401k. After months of trying to get the problems resolved, DH just decided he didn't want to keep dealing with these problems another year.
As a result, DH is going to work for a new employer starting next week. Last year, he was only able to contribute 10% of his salary to a 401k (all from Job 1). This year, the goal is to max out 401k contributions.

We sold about 25% of our Disney timeshare points in 2012. This reduced our member fees by more than 25%. We are looking at possible another further reduction of another 20% of our points.

We did some home projects last year- new roof, new cement stairs to the basement, etc. We have a couple more projects for 2013. I think we can do new windows and a new bathroom.

I want to continue to streamline paperwork. We' ve sold most of our individual stocks--putting them in a target fund. We have a few odds and ends to clean up. It is a huge relief to me to reduce the paperwork.

[JoeP]

I really want to budget better, even if it means setting up accounts and having part of my pay go into them automatically. When it is time to pay expenses, I want the money to be there.

I'd like to also take a breather when it comes to buying big ticket items (not that we do this too much anyway) so that we can fund our Roths fully. This past year, we bought a dishwasher and had a few medium expenses.

We'd also like to give more to charity.

[YLTL_Dan]

Well, our goals are actually quite strange this year... my wife is quitting her job, I'm going on an unpaid leave for 9 months, and we're traveling around the world! It's going to be really hard to watch the cash outflow with minimal inflow, but it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and we've decided to pursue it!

[papa_squat]

2011 was a big spending year for us, so 2012 was the year of saving. Our investmests did pretty well on top of that, so we decided 2013 would be the year of spending again. We're going to build the garage shop we've been planning on ever since we bought our home in 2009. This was also the year we had eyeballed for starting a family, so it coluld be quite an expensive one.

Here are the (semi-financial) goals we came up with:

1. Take a 3-day ski trip for our anniversary (we're still shopping around for the best package). Our vacation time is always eaten up with trips back home to see family, so getting to go out just us is our first priority.

2. Demo as much as the old shop as we can ourselves and contract the rest except for the finishing work the husband wants to handle himself (We originally budgeted $40k for this, but I'm hoping it will be less, but we won't know until we actually call around with our contractors).

3. Repaint the downstairs living room and hit craigslist for a few furniture deals (still deciding if we're going to ditch the current carpet amnd replace the flooring; I think it will last another 5 years easily, but we need to have it stretched in at least one room if we do which is a pain in the but for old carpet).

4. Max out our Roth IRAs this year (we just opened them last year but only did $3k each to save for the shop).

5. Get down to babymakin' once Goals 1-4 are at least underway I guess . We set a goal to have $10k ready to go into a 529 for each child before they are born and we should be on track for #1 we can keep the shop project in the low range).

Other financial-related goals we are considering:

-Get a credit card with air miles. We only have one credit card each and we earn great cash rewards, but we live 2,000 miles from our families and are always having to fly, so it would be nice to get a break on the ridiculous airfare we pay while we're at it.

-Probably need to consider life insurance and wills before kids come or before I turn 30 at least.

-Pay off our car early. We did a 3-year loan at 0.9% interest that will be paid off 3/2014, but with the interest rate that low and the shop project, I doubt that's going to happen.

-Start saving for a bathroom remodel in 2014-2015 to accomidate the expanding household.

[rossmel]

All I aim for 2013 is a good credit. Maybe I'll try to find a part time job aside from my job now or work overtime. Or I need to join more free sample site to have more free samples - that is still a saving and my biggest goal is to have a longer patience.