2007 Financial Goals
Now is the right time to look ahead and set some goals for the upcoming year. Here are mine:
- Complete the beefing up of the CD-ladder portion of my emergency fund. This will be done by adding $1,000 to a new CD in December. This will put about 40% of the fund in laddered long-term CDs, with the rest in short-term CDs and a high-interest money market account.
- Either pay down $5,000 extra on the mortgage by June, or use the same money to fully-fund my spouses Roth, with the extra $1,000 going into mine. This is an either/or, since I’m not convinced extra retirement savings is the best use of our money. To retire early (age 55 for me), we will need the house paid off and have money to live off of that aren’t tied up in accounts we can’t get to until we’re older.
- Increase the monthly contributions to our children’s 529 plans from $100 to $150 in May.
- Put in the time and effort to develop a passive income stream. This isn’t fleshed out yet, and may or may not be related to my stable of websites.
- Open a brokerage account to save money not needed for retirement (see 2 above) or for the emergency fund.
- Save enough for a 2008 family cruise. We’re estimating that $6,000 will be what it takes.
[…] No BS Finance: 2007 Financial Goals […]
I’m seeing a 2007 trend of increasing passive income. I’ll be putting my hat in that race too. I gotta thank Flexo for posting up other’s goals — I’m finding lots of new blogs like this one. Keep up the good work.
Thanks Donna Jean. Now the hard part starts - coming up with the idea(s) that work. I almost think that “passive” is a misnomer - it will take a lot of effort to set the stream(s) up in the first place.
[…] 2006 has been quite an adventure and has set the stage for 2007 to follow suite with many personal, social, and financial quests. It is now time to consider the choices available for charting a course through 2007. I’ve set up general and specific goals that are attainable with dilligence and a little stretchingwhere needed. […]
#2 is interesting, and probably worth a whole other post. What decision points are you going to use to make the final call? I am also on the early retirement front, and for me, paying off the house before retirement is key. I’m probably closer to it than you are, however. (note: retirement for me is equivalent to financial independence. ie. not HAVING to work for the man).
RetiringEarly.blogspot.com
Right now its just a gut feel that will guide my decision. There is absolutely no way I would contemplate retirement while still having a mortgage. If I were planning on a “normal” retirement age where I would have access to my retirement money immediately, I might not care too much about prepaying the mortgage (other than not reducing my interest expense).
However, I’m leaning towards using the money towards the mortgage based solely on liquidity at my planned retirement age.
I’m also expecting to move somewhere for work that is cheaper than where we currently live in the next few years. Instead of buying a bigger house that costs the same as our current house, we’ll buy the same size, which will be cheaper.