It's good to take stock of things periodically. Here I compare our personal finance goals from six years ago, to today, and hit on the biggest game-changer: budgeting …
Blogging has a lot of benefits. In one sense, it's a public journal: a place to document what's going on. The journaling part is valuable for the blogger, of course, but it also has the chance of being valuable for anyone else willing to read it. (By the way … thank you for reading!)
Sometimes I was bold enough to post goals for all to see. Sometimes this worked out; other times not. Either
A look to six years ago
A little over six years ago I posted some of our personal finance goals along with a plan on how to get there, with dates. The goals were mostly SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound.
Here were the goals we had in January 2013:
- Saving $5,000 emergency fund by August 2013. This didn't happen. If I recall, we didn't have the commitment to do this, and we also got hit with a government furlough only a few months later.
- Pay off our van loan by September 2014. We paid off the loan, but not in this time frame. We didn't increase our payments more.
- The buildup of a $15,000 vehicle fund by July 2015. This didn't happen either, mainly for the same reasons as the above two
- Pay off our rental mortgage a year early in mid-2017. This was one we actually came close on, paying the mortgage off in the last quarter of 2017. It wasn't from saving up and paying down over time, though; we paid it off in a lump sum. We had taken Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University through our church that
fall and in the process of readjusting our life insurance, we surrendered a cash-value policy in favor of a term policy and used the proceeds to pay off that mortgage early. - Begin paying down our primary mortgage after the rental mortgage was done. We haven't done this yet but instead, we're paying down two 401(k)-like loans we took on in the Thrift Savings Plan. One is gone, and we're accelerating the payments on that one now. Again, we took this action as a result of what we learned in Financial Peace University.
So, we were zero for five on our goals back then. Ouch.
What's different six years later
If I had to sum up what's different now from what it was six years ago, it's this
We have a written budget every month.
We've done this for a year and a half now. We use a manual pen and paper budget system. I'm actually a bit surprised that we've kept it up this long.
Back in 2011 and 2012, we didn't have a written budget, and it was no wonder that the money kind of vanished.
Being faithful to a budget makes where the money goes clear. It really doesn't vanish anymore. We know how much is saved up, and for what.
Six years later, we have a sizable emergency fund, and are working on paying off our last non-mortgage debt before tackling the big one.
Three steps to getting started
If you're not working under the benefit of a written budget, please start. We didn't have one for a long time, to our detriment.
Here's how:
- Start with a simple zero-based budget. I'll make it really easy for you: I'll give you a template! Simply download it to your computer and get started. The instructions are here.
- Get some SMART goals working for you. Here's another free download to get that started. Here's a reference on how to make sure your goals are actually goals and not just projections.
- Finally, please don't give up. It does get easier with time. We've started and stopped enough time to empathize. It's worth it! You're worth it!
Photo by Jim Wilson on Unsplash
