2008 Goals!
- Most people talk of setting, recording, and tracking goals. I do that with this post.
- Retiring Debt
- A loan against my 401(k) plan
- Pay off the loan on our 2002 model impala car
- This is not a complete set of loans just a few we can pick off easily and in the near future. When those two are paid off I will revisit this situation. I hope to be in that happy state by October of 2008. However, by that time I have the feeling our home loan and taxes will be be taking up a fair amount of resources.
- Paying off our credit card bills every month.
This loan will be paid off at the end of this month. I plan to put that to use to:
We have roughly one and a half years to go on the loan but with the retirement of our 401(K) loan we can double our payment on the Impala and get it off the books. Additional savings will kick in by dropping comprehensive coverage on the vehicle. We have two vehicles I am okay with dropping comp on one of them or looking into a way to just insure against a total loss or major damage.
So far from this summer we have been doing that but we need to keep those bills small enough.
- Saving at least a little bit every month.
- Tracking our spending.
- Developing other income streams.
It is not going to be a lot but at least a little bit, we will place the savings into a remote account (i.e. one not so easily transferred back into checking) so it will be harder to spend and if we can get used to going without the amount we are saving we can increase a little bit more every so often.
As I have discussed here before what you can not measure you can not improve. To improve our spending habits we need to find out what they are. To accomplish this I will take every receipt we have and enter it into a spreadsheet I have set up for this purpose. Right now, expenditures are my priority. I expect, it will not be 100% on (e.g. pop machines do not issue receipts) but we should know with a fair amount of certainty where our money is going.
I do not want to talk too much about this one.
Trying to change myself and you on thrift and savings! It is hard to save save save in a spend spend spend world, but it is better to save than spend!