I last updated our goals at the beginning of September. Here is our progress since then:
–Pay off our credit cards. Fail. We owed $15,815.82 when I set these goals on January 4th, and now, as of October 3rd, our balance is $11,345.10 Unfortunately, the balance grew this past month, so this is a fail.
–Pay off my student loan. On Track. On January 4th, my student loan had a balance of $6,167.53; as of October 3rd, the balance was $4,720.12, so we have paid off $1,447.41 or 23.4%.
–Snowflake at least $750 a month on debt. Fail. This continues to be at a standstill. I don’t see it happening in the foreseeable future, either, as most of our extra money now is being funneled to medical bills.
–Sell $1,000 of stuff around the house. On target. In 2011, we sold $1,550 of stuff, and the goal is to sell $1,000 in 2012. Right now we have sold $590, but we better get busy to meet this goal by the end of the year.
–Lose 25% of my body weight. On track. Thanks to my restrictive diet, I lost a lot of weight this month. I am now at 9% of my weight gone. I probably won’t reach the full 25% this calendar year, but I hope to be close.
–Get 7 to 8 hours of sleep a night. On track. The diet I am on is making me tired, so I am routinely sleeping at least 7 to 8 hours now. I should have started doing this earlier; it feels good to get a good night’s sleep.
–Send my daughter to Japanese school. Accomplish & Fail. After much debate and viewing two other potential schools, my husband and I decided to send our daughter to Japanese school. She went from May through September, but we have pulled her out because we could no longer afford it.
–Increase our emergency fund. Fail. In January, my target was to have an emergency fund of $3,000. We had to dip into our emergency fund again because September expenses are very high. This is yet another reason why we need to restructure our budget. I haven’t been saving for yearly expenses such as license plate tabs and insurance, so I have to dip into the emergency fund frequently. Instead, I need to set that money aside, even if it means less money for debt repayment. We now have $611 in our emergency fund.
How are you doing on your goals?
HA HA epic fail for my goals! I set mine way to high and then when record heat came, not enough time in my days and everything else I just got so off track I found I was not even doing any actions to reach my goals and the ones I did manage just outright failed.
Reviewing everything these last few months in the year I decided to go a completely different route and brand new angle to where I think I will not only work towards the new goals but will be successful as well!
Don’t get discouraged! Attack, attack. From the debt-free side, I can say that the intensity was really worth it.
I can’t wait to be on the debt free side. 🙂 It is a long battle, but well worth it.
I HATE those “annual costs” they derail me, too. Our car insurance, life insurance, auto taxes, and auto registration renewals are ALL due Sept-Nov. Naturally, right before the holidays. Grrrrrrrrr!
Almost all my financial goals are on track last September, except I have overspent on our house expenses. I usually set aside a certain budget for our house expenses, but this time we got carried away while shopping and spent a few hundred bucks more.
It is so easy to get side-tracked, but it sounds like you have a handle on it.
Melissa, you have not failed. You have merely hit a few roadblocks. Failure would have been to have never tried.
A big help to us was to only focus on one big goal at a time. You guys are attacking so many things at once. Just food for thought.
I think you are right. We are scattering our energy, and right now we really need to just focus on one goal.