This year is really on the move, isn’t it? It’s hard to believe we’re already an entire month in, and it’s time for a check up of our yearly S.M.A.R.T. (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, timed) goals. You can find the list of our yearly goals here if you missed it.
Each Monday I list out the baby steps I am planning in order to march us towards these bigger yearly goals. I consider it my accountability check in. If you’d like to join me, you can always leave comments or links to your own goals. I’d love to build a community of people encouraging one another towards their goals.
February Check In Time
Home and Barn
- Get a water plan in place. Have not done anything here.
- Barn driveway. We need to make some calls to get this ball rolling in the spring.
- Improve goat pens and fencing. Another spring and summer project. I’ve cleaned up the barn and we are considering how to configure the pens.
- Finish the bathroom project. Have taken some baby steps towards this, and I’ve chosen a paint color!
- Paint baseboards and staircase. Finishing the baseboards is on my list of goals for this week, and I’ve chosen my staircase color! Goal is to paint the stair area by the end of the month.
Family
- Swimming. This will be a summer goal.
- Vacation. Need to start discussing a destination and date.
- One on One Time. I have made effort to spend some one on one time with the kids, but I think I can make this goal a little more SMART than it is right now.
Marriage
- Date. We have a date scheduled for this weekend! Hopefully no one gets sick…
Personal
- Faith. I’ve been doing my daily Bible readings more often than not, but room for improvement here.
- Read. I should have gotten through a book in January and I didn’t! Goal is to read a book this week.
- Exercise. If you count hauling a lot of water to the goats, then I’ve totally done this!
Blogging
I did not make blogging goals on my yearly post, which was a fail. I want to be more specific here, so let’s try this:
- Improve social media. Would like to have 5,000 Twitter followers, 600 Facebook likes, and want to add 2,000 pins to my Pinterest page by year end.
- Learn. Take 12 classes on ways to improve my blogging. (Did one in January.)
- Views. Right now I have about 6,000 pageviews per month. I’d like to increase that to 18,000 pageviews per month by the end of the year. I’ll do this by adding the best content I can write, encouraging my readers to share when they like what they’ve read, and getting out into the blogging community as much as possible.
- Guest post. I’d like to start writing at least 1 guest post per month.
- Monetize. I need this blog to earn some money to help with our BHAG, so I will be exploring ways to monetize when I can. The main goal of this blog is to help people as much as possible, so I will only explore ways to earn money that are truly beneficial to my readers. (Otherwise, I’m sure I won’t have those readers for long!)
The BHAG
[Tweet “Do you have a #BHAG? Here’s an update on how ours is going.”]
You might remember that our family has a BHAG this year. A big, hairy, audacious goal. That goal, for us, is to pay off some debt that amounts to 19% of our bring home pay. Our plan for this goal is…
- #yearofno This has become our mantra, and the whole family is behind it now. They know that if they are asking for an extra (Can we have fast food? Can I have this toy? etc) that the answer is going to be #yearofno. It’s kind of turned into a running joke, and it needs no explanation.
- Be prepared. Not eating fast food is a running theme on this blog, because it’s always been a problem for us! Pizza, stopping for drinks, these things are bad habits. I’m so excited to tell you that we made it through January without any fast food or pizza runs! I’ve started planning ahead for all of our trips. It doesn’t take that much effort to bring extra drinks along.
- Bigger pie. I have listed several things for sale and tried for some market research studies without a whole lot of luck. But I’m going to keep trying!
- Get creative. We didn’t need a lot of creativity last month, because there just isn’t a lot going on in January. More than anything, we just said no a lot. Which is fine by me.
So how did we do on our BHAG?
The Good:
This month we were able to bring down our debt by 8.2%. We still have 91.8% of the debt to go.
This is not too bad for one month! We need to pay off at least 8.3% of the debt each month in order to eliminate it by the end of the year, so we nearly met those expectations in January.
The bad. (Well, not bad. The meh?)
The reason we were able to hit the expectation is that January was a 3 paycheck month. This isn’t a bad thing…much better than letting the extra paycheck go to waste. But it’s just a little discouraging that we were only able to get to this number due to an extra paycheck which I can’t replicate every month.
Also discouraging was the fact that all of our paycheck savings from cracking down on excess spending actually had to go toward supplies for the goats. It seems like it’s always something!
But, to focus on a more positive spin, we didn’t have to put the goat spending on a credit card or rob our savings account to cover it. So that’s still a win. And there won’t be unexpected expenses with every paycheck, so at some point we will get ahead.
The plan
For February, the plan will be to continue our #yearofno as much as possible and try to throw some extra at the debt. Additionally, I will need to bring in some extra money either by selling items or using other creative forms of income. I also want to keep up our penny mindset. (If you missed this post on the power of a penny, be sure to check it out!)
If you’d like to help us meet our goal, remember that any click through referral or affiliate links on this blog gives us a small payment without changing your out of pocket costs. (However, I would never ask you to buy anything that would put a speedbump in your own frugal journey!)
How are your yearly goals or resolutions going? Let’s support each other! Be sure to like MSF on Facebook to keep up with our goals and get more money saving tips and stories.
Good work on you goals! My financial focus is to save at least $1,000/month. I exceeded that goal in January but will be changing jobs mid-month in Feb, and am nervous about my income and ability to save. A big part of my success will be saying no to myself when I want fast food/impulse buys.
Fast food…my personal weakness. I was so excited to get away from it in January, and I hope we can continue it throughout the year. Good luck to you, hope your new job goes well!
Good luck with your goals. I’m hoping for a date weekend this weekend and hoping the new water heater can get installed today so it doesn’t ruin our plans! We don’t go out for pizza as often anymore but we are still suckers for impulsive trips to Bojangles. Hopefully we’ve had our fill for awhile. Hope you’ll link up your goals with our goals linkup in my February goals post!
I’ll pop over and check out your goals post for sure! Good luck on getting a date in. We have one planned for this weekend…but it seems like one of the kids gets sick every time I make plans for a date. So frustrating, both because we need some date time and because I almost feel like I’m scheduling someone to get sick. Argh!
Great post!! It will inspire me to set my goals for 2015 which I haven’t done yet.
Good luck in achieving them – you can do it!
Thanks so much for your encouragement!
I think you did awesome!!! 🙂 You almost met your BHAG % goal exactly! Keep looking for sources of extra money. I have had luck with Consignment shops and Ibotta so far (wrote about them on my blog). Also, I have been doing Swagbucks in spare moments because that money can be cashed out as PayPal and sent directly to debt.
Keep up the good work!
Congrats on no fast food or pizza for January! I wish I could say the same about my month, ha – maybe for February!
We recently had a financial kerfuffle – the Mister’s pay schedule changed, and he took a week and a half vacation based on his old pay schedule, and we ended up tighter for funds at the end of the month than we thought we would be. It was a stressful evening trying to figure out how to make all of the ends come together (it did, in the end, simply because of how everything lined up, but only with some hard thinking). That’s not something I’m looking at doing again any time soon. But it is hard when the other half (ahm, Mister, lookin’ at you!) isn’t as on board. So it’s frustrating.
So far as the debt repayment goes, the struggle is real. I hate saying that phrase, but it really is true. We have a truck payment and a motorcycle payment. And while, for a while, we were able to make extra payments on them, things are just too tight right now. I would love to have the motorcycle paid off (because it has the lowest balance) but it’s still a bit of a way off. Darn you Honda financing, ha. But, we are hoping to move in a few months (to a duplexish situation with a friend, not another apartment!) and will hopefully be able to spend less on rent and other house-based bills. Fingers crossed!
Sounds like a great way to save some money! Creative living situations make the best money savers sometimes.
I love how you have specific goals and you are showing how you can meet them!! I also have 5 kids, and I love how you call it a Middle sized family. Most people I meet think 5 kids is a lot!
People do tend to think 5 kids is a lot…but I like to say that we aren’t large enough for our own reality show. So we must be medium sized instead! haha! Us Moms of 5 need to stick together, right?
Thanks for sharing your goals! It really puts on a reality on how much mothers have to organize things to keep the family running. I really struggle with saying “no” to the Starbucks when I drive by, but I know it would be a huge money saver. I think I need to adopt #yearofno!
Good job Jaime! I know the feeling of always having something pop up, we had to buy new tires with a bonus from my husband’s job. A little discouraging, but at least he will be safe on his way to work!
Good work paying down debt! Don’t you love those months with extra paychecks? You can do it!
Keep working; you’ll figure it out. Is there any way to make money from those goats?
Sort of, maybe, eventually…They are 4-H projects for our kids. We are hoping to grow the herd to the point where we can sell some of the babies to other 4-Hers and earn some money that way.
Wow, you have great goals and seem super organized. I’m in the same boat with another commenter….I have not set my 2016 goals yet….bummer. I have started setting my blogging goals for the year and have a few homeschool goals but nothing set in stone. Get post and you have a great site.
oh, and I just followed you on all your social media 😉
Great!
I used to be good at staying organized, but I’ve struggled for the past few years. Figured it was time to get back on track, and what better way than on a public forum with lots of accountability? haha! Thanks for reading.
Jamie, it sounds like you’re doing great! I love reading your posts and the encouragement to be frugal. I’m going to start implementing the #yearofno as well!
I love this idea, and you have some great goals for all aspects of your life. Thanks for partying with us on the #FridayFrivolity party. I hope you will join us again next week.
Thanks for sharing your goals at Funtastic Friday!
You have quite a few victories there! When my husband started bringing his lunch to work instead of buying, that saved us almost $50 a week. The fast food runs really do add up. You’ve inspired me to set some blogging goals. Mine are very general, but I think it’s more productive to make them specific. I like how you set an amount of facebook likes and followers that you’re aiming for. I’m going to do that now too!
I LOVE reading others goals and accomplishments! It’s so nice to see someone overcome something I might be in the middle of myself 😉
I always enjoy it, too! Glad you find it helpful. 🙂 A part of me always wonders if other people would really enjoy my updates or not, but I love the accountability of putting them out there.
Way to go on your progress!! Could you do something crafty and put it on etsy? Goat milk soap maybe??? ;P
Love the #yearofno! And it makes life sooo much easier when everyone is on board…
#FridayFrivolity 🙂
Thank you! I’m really, really bad at crafts and DIY, unfortunately. But it definitely is time for me to think outside the box like that, so thanks for sparking my imagination a little!
LOL! Right now we’re still trying to hold our head above the water. So many hoops to jump through and the rules and appointments change by the day, sometimes by the hour. We have learned at this point that we have to go with the flow. When things calm down we’ll be able to set goals, right now we aren’t even sure what our day looks like tomorrow, much less the next week or month. I can’t wait until we get to that point! Then I’ll make a BHAG! Promise!
You are doing great with yours, you are keeping it in mind and planning from there, keep it up!
Good idea to share your goals progress! Are you familiar with Cherie Lowe’s book “Slaying the Debt Dragon”? It’s a good read with great tips. And her site is great too – The Queen of Free!
I’ve read a lot of debt and personal finance books, but I hadn’t come across that one. Will add it to my to read list. Thanks for the info!
We’re trying to pay off debt too. I really tried to make February a “no dining out” month, but that didn’t work very well for us. We are eating out less, so I guess it is some progress.
Thanks for sharing on the Homestead Blog Hop.
Something about aim for the moon and landing among the stars?? Progress is great, even if you didn’t hit exactly where you were aiming.
Creating goals is such a good idea! I’ve been doing that this year too, all to try and improve my happiness. I love that you’ve included achievable and realistic goals. None of that ‘Win the lotto’ stuff 😛 x #abitofeverything
haha! I’d love to add “win the lotto” to that list. If only I could figure out how to win without spending money on tickets?
Thanks so much for the visit.