My 2012 Goals

I know a lot of people scoff at New Year's resolutions, but I love them. I love the start of a fresh year, full of promise and another chance to create the life you dream of. So with that in mind, I resolve this year to work towards our financial and personal goals, and try to make sure every important decision I make somehow gets us further to those goals. I shared our money goals for 2011 in this post, and some of these will carry over to this year.

Money Goals
Complete our 8-month emergency fund
Increase our contribution to retirement by 1%
Continue to stay on budget using my new system
Complete the legacy drawer by March

Pretty Goals
Go on a date once a month
Continue to make my home a comfortable place to be, on a budget
Experiment more with my cooking and menu planning

What about you? Any goals for the year?

Image from here

2011 Goals...even though the year is almost over!

Image from here

I've posted before about our monthly goals, but we also have long term goals we like to set each year. I keep these goals written on the bottom of my budget spreadsheet, so I'm constantly reminded of them.

These are our goals for 2011. Some have already been completed. And some may not be completed by the end of the year, but we're shooting for it!
1. Eliminate furniture store card. Complete. We bought a mattress two years ago with a 0% interest store card. But I got sick of having that debt on our spreadsheets, so we went ahead and paid it off ahead of schedule.
2. 10K in savings by the end of July. Complete. Since we had concentrated on eliminating debt, and then went to just one income, it left us with savings that were a little low. We're on the way to building that back up, and we completed this earlier this year.
3. Build Emergency Fund to 8 months. In progress. We're slowly making our way towards this one. We've set a goal to complete this by the end of next year.
4. Start a Roth IRA. Complete. See this post.
5. Come up with money for a new computer. In progress. We've had our computer for 6 years, and are trying to save enough to buy a new one before this one goes kaput. So any extra cash we get our hands on (like gifts or side income) goes in a drawer to go toward the new compute. We're about 3/4 of the way there.
6. Complete a Legacy Drawer. In progress. If you're wondering what a Legacy Drawer is, here's the explanation. I actually just added this to the list of goals recently, but I am wanting to finish before the end of the year.

So, there they are!