2009 Goal Update

So I’m a year late but I wanted to do a quick run down of our 2009 goals. We hit some and fell short on others, but I think analyzing what did and didn’t work for us is important to deciding how we’ll conquer our goals in 2010.

Last year Matt and I set a few optimistic financial goals.


~ Reduce our monthly spending by 5% ($250)
We were able to reduce our spending but I’m not quite sure by how much. We have more defined goals for 2010 to help track this.

~ Save $4,000 for a car
This goal we hit and actually exceeded. To date we have $4,724 in our car fund. After we reached our $4,000 goal we continued to put an extra 5% of our savings into the fund

~ Save $5,000 in an emergency fund
This is another goal we were able to hit and then some. We have $5,218 in our emergency fund.

~ Save $12,500 for our retirement
This goal we fell very short on with only $1,014 in savings. But this is where the analysis kicks in.

Once Matt and I fully funded our car and emergency fund we just said “let’s put everything extra into our retirement fund” so of course there was never anything extra. We did purchase a new home with some of the money as a down payment and basically refinished most of the home before moving in. I’d say in totally we spent about $7,000 + on all of that, which means we were actually able to save a lot but put it to good use in other ways.

One of our goals was to purchase a long term home which we were obviously able to do, I plan for us to live here at least ten to fifteen years hopefully longer. Having a stable place and reasonable home payment will help us reach our other financial goals.


Along with our financial goals I also set some personal and health ones as well.

~ Read 50 Books in 2009
I didn’t hit this goal either but made some great improvements in my overall book reading. So far I’ve reviewed 30 books for OnOurWay but have actually read 33. While I didn’t hit the goal of 50 I read more books in 2009 than if I hadn’t set the goal at all so I’m counting it as a win.

~ Reduce our material possessions by 30%
Matt and I did a really good job of this while we moved but I want to step it up even more and reduce reduce reduce in 2010

And we didn’t do so well in the health side of goals as I didn’t hit any of them. I think they were just too ambitious to start with right away.

So one Lesson Learned in 2009: Set defined and track able goals in order to help us stay on course I hope to take this new knowledge about how Matt and I handle goal accomplishment and use it to set even better goals in 2010.

What goals did you hit or miss in 2009 and how to you plan to use that information to kick butt in 2010?