2018 Financial Goals

Welcome to my 2018 Financial Goals.  Happy New Year everyone!  As I do every year, I’ve been thinking about how we fared in 2017 in terms of our financial goals and about where I’d like us to be in 2018.

These reports really help me to focus my thoughts on my financial priorities, while my monthly reports help me to track their progress throughout the year. Too often, we’re caught up in the day to day hustle and bustle of our daily lives that we don’t take the time to think about where we’d like to be in a year, or 5, or even 10 years down the road.

Our brains are hard wired to focus on the most immediate task at hand so it can be a challenge to engage in any kind of long term planning. This is precisely why a lot of us fail to properly plan and save for our retirement or even scrape together an emergency fund. Too often people put these things off until the last minute. It’s the reason that the average American family has about $50k saved for retirement.

One thing I’ve learned over the years is that financial success doesn’t just happen. We need to take a little time to think about our income and expenses and our saving and investing. We need to develop realistic goals and lay out a plan so we can achieve them.

My approach to developing these goals is simple. I think about where I want to be a year from now.

2017 FINANCIAL GOALS IN REVIEW

Last year, we laid out 5 financial goals.  So let’s see how we fared.

1.  Continue saving, investing and paying down debt so that we become millionaires in 2017!  I expect that with our investing plan, we’ll cross the $1 million mark in net worth, which means we’ll be paper millionaires.  For many people, this is an important financial milestone and I’ll be happy to reach it before we turn 40.  But net worth alone doesn’t equate to financial freedom.  To reach that goal, we need to continue to focus on building up our passive investment income.

I’m pleased to say that we crossed the coveted million dollar mark in August so goal achieved!

2.  Earn 25k in passive income.  This should be achievable if we invest in our registered accounts, continue to re-invest our dividend income and the profit from our rentals, as well as get some nice dividend increases.

We fell short on this goal. We ended up selling our rental properties due to property management issues and I had to adjust our passive income goal down to $13K from our financial assets and came in at $12.3k.

3.  Max out RESPs.  Our children’s future education is important to us so we will continue to save towards it.

We were able to achieve this goal with a little help from a relative.

4.  Max out our registered accounts.  Our retirement accounts and other tax-free accounts will be maxed out this year.

We managed to achieve about 70% of this goal. We fell short because of our decision to focus a little more on making extra payments on our mortgage.

5.  Pay down 35k on our mortgageso that it goes below the 400k mark.  Sooner or later interest rates will rise and I don’t want to be caught with a monster mortgage.

We blew this goal out of the water! We managed to pay down a whopping $85K on our mortgage. We are well below the 400K mark thanks to the proceeds from the sale of our rental properties.

2018 Financial Goals

Well we’ve experienced our share of setbacks this year, but I’m very pleased with how things turned out.  I feel like we’re in a great position to start off 2018.  So here are our financial goals for 2018.

1. Earn 14k in passive income.  This should be achievable if we invest in our registered accounts, continue to re-invest our dividend income and get some nice dividend increases.

2. Max out RESPs.  Our children’s future education is important to us so we will continue to save towards it.

3. Max out our registered accounts.  Our retirement accounts and other tax-free accounts will be maxed out this year.

4. Pay down 60k on our mortgageso that it goes below the 300k mark.  Interest rates are on the rise and I don’t want to be caught with too much mortgage debt.  I think there will be a lot of financial pain for people who aren’t thinking about a pay down strategy for all the debt that they accumulated at record low interest rates.

Those are our 2018 financial goals and our financial plan for the year.  Do you have any financial goals or resolutions for 2018?

Thanks for reading my 2018 financial goals.