January Goal Update

Can you believe January is already over? That means it is time to check in on our goals.

Financial Goals

• Gain employment (Race) 🗹
• Race signed a job offer in mid January and had his first day of work January 31!! This is very exciting to check this goal off this quickly as we will be much more able to accomplish our remaining financial goals.
• Save 50% of our income
• For the month of January, we were able to save ~55% of our income when we included the mortgage payment. So far so good, but our savings amounts will be stepping up once Race starts getting paid again. While more pay will make it easier to save, it will increase the amount we need to save to hit the same 50% goal.
• Increase passive dividend income by 25%
• Year over year for the month of January, our dividend income has increased by 8.9%. Our goal is to increase dividend income for the entire year and thus a yoy of a month is not necessarily the best estimate. In January we earned approximately 4% of the amount needed to reach our dividend increase goal. January is one of the lower earning months for dividends and we did not contribute towards stocks this month. Without any contributions or reinvestments, we are on track for a 6% increase for the year.
• Increase net worth by ~14%
• The bull market has caused our retirement and stocks to gain some steam this month. We are up around 2.6% for the month of January. We expect this to rise a little upon paying off remaining students loans and with savings, however, we do not anticipate this rate of change to continue throughout the year. It is likely that it will slightly level off, but 14% is still within our reach.
• Earn $2,000 tutoring
• I did not get off to an amazing start with tutoring this month, but managed to bring in $50 which is about 1/3 of the amount I needed to bring in to stay on track. Our Mexico trip did cut out approximately 11 days from my availability, but I will start to pick up more students as the semester progresses.
•  For anyone else interested in a little side income, here is a list of where I get my students from:
• Varsity Tutors- Provides several opportunities daily. You must pass a short (~5min) qualification test in order to tutor preferred subjects. Pays less than finding students on your own, but there is no work on your end to gain students. If you use the link above to join, you will earn an extra $40 for signing up!
• Take Lessons - Allows you to post your profile. Students will contact you if they are interested. Much fewer opportunities than Varsity Tutors, however, you are able to set the amount your students will pay. You will get a higher percentage of that amount based on repeat customers.
• University Tutor - Allows you to post a profile. Interested students will contact you. While fewer opportunities than Varsity Tutors, the income potential is much higher here. You pay no fees to list and pay no third party, meaning you get to keep everything that you charge.
• Rolland Tutoring YouTube
• Rolland Tutoring Blog, Facebook, and Twitter
• Earn $100 on YouTube/Blogging -- PLEASE SUBSCRIBE!
• Sadly, this goal will be drastically lowered. Due to YouTube's policy change, we will no longer be monetized until we reach 1,000 subscribers. If you haven't already, please subscribe to help us! The AdSense revenue so far has not added up to much, but we will still continue trying to earn using the blog.
• Without YouTube, we will be looking at a goal of around $15 from the blog and YouTube. If we hit the subscriber count this year, we will readjust our goal.
• This month we earned $7.22. This is slightly lower than the $8.33 needed to stay on track for the year, but still encouraging that we are making money. Our best videos so far have been gardening and grilling related so we hope to have an uptick in earnings when the spring and summer hit. We will keep posting new content to encourage more activity.
• Sell $150 worth of Random Lily soaps
• We sold $90 worth of soap this month. This was higher than typical as one buyer was using the soap as favors for a bridal shower. The second large sale was a result of etsy coupons offered. The quantity sold was higher than expected, but we are hoping with periodic coupons we will be able to easily meet this goal. We are ~60% completed for this goal.
• Stay within the budget
• Yes and no... We still are ahead since we didn't budget Race's unemployment income into our spreadsheet, but we spent a lot of money this month. We will still be good for the whole year though. By far the majority of our spending was as Sam's club. Our Sam's club closed recently and had everything on sale for 25% off and then 50% off. We capitalized on this by buying dried goods, household supplies, clothing, and car maintenance supplies. This skewed the budget, since we likely will have far less spending on groceries in the coming months. So this one remains to be seen, but I am optimistic for the year goal.

Business Goals

• Post 150+ videos to Thriftism YouTube channel
• We posted 8 videos this month. This is around 4-5 videos shy of what we needed to publish to stay on track. Good news - we recorded many more videos than this while on vacation so we should be able to catch up in the next month here.
• Post 52+ blog posts
• Only 2 posts this month. We can still catch up on this one and will be soon doing a few more DIY posts.
• Reach 200 YouTube subscribers
• We are at 145 subscribers. This is a pretty substantial increase from 100 and puts us almost halfway to our goal. Sadly, YouTube is removing our monetization. We will continue producing content, but will have to push harder for more subscribers. If you haven't already, please take the time to subscribe.
• Grow Twitter to 1,000 followers
• Currently at 900. YAY! This happened fairly quickly, so we aren't sure if the followers will hold. If we hit 1,000 quickly, we plan to change up this goal to continue growing our audience. Thanks for all those who are supporting!
• Write London Guide Book
• Finished the transportation section of the guide.
• Write Munich Guide Book
• Template downloaded.
• Begin ThriftyFit Series on YouTube
• Still in brainstorming process, but will be coming soon.
• Create math practice workbook
• Not yet started.
• Post 52+ videos to Rolland Tutoring YouTube channel
• We posted 3 videos to Rolland Tutoring which is almost keeping pace with our goal. The plan is to continue publishing a video every week on Sundays. We will have to push a few more in there on other days to meet the goal.
• Post 52+ videos to Reviews with the Rollands YouTube channel
• Only 1 posted. We will keep posted for some time, but may decide to focus on the review blog or combine the review videos on Thriftism to hit our monetization goals. We will update this later in the year.

Fitness Goals

• Lose 10 pounds by May 1, 2018
• Nothing yet, but we have started working out regularly. Now we just need to get the food thing and burning enough calories right too.
• Lose an additional 5-10 pounds by December 1, 2018
• We will re-evaluate after the May 1 goal to determine what number seems fitting.
• Complete 1 - 30 day workout challenge
• We are on day 19 of a 30 day Yoga Challenge now. While we did skip ~11 days while we were traveling (we did still workout those days), we still plan to finish this challenge. We will count that as complete even if it is out of order since we usually don't follow through after missing a few days. We may decide to add another challenge later in the year and try to do the workouts closer together, but hitting every day is not likely due to travel and work schedules.
• Workout 4x/week
• We only missed 3 days in January. Two of those days we were on a plane and the other day we were driving to the cities. We probably could have snuck in a workout, but since we hit every other day, we decided to take a break. We did yoga and beach volleyball almost every day of vacation and swam the other days. We did yoga the other days in January. We may try to work in more high intensity workouts with the yoga in February, but consistency was the goal.

Mental Goals

• Read 6 self-improvement books
• Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill (Just Started)
• Read 6 additional general books
• Inferno by Dan Brown (~25%)

• Attend church 1/month
• We missed going this month as we were gone on the weekends.
• Complete 2 Coursera courses
• Have not started this goal yet.
• Master Spanish on Duolingo (all gold bars) - Ashley 🗹

• Completed 1/15/18. However, I am still at 59% fluency so I will continue practicing throughout the year to improve my Spanish skills and will try to keep the bars golden throughout this year.
• Complete Duolingo or book Spanish lesson 3x/week - Race
• Completed almost every day before vacation. Did not do while on vacation, but was in a Spanish speaking country.

Fun, Travel, Social, Relationship, House, Hobby Goals

• Host 2 game nights
• None have been hosted so far.
• Attend 1 monthly social outing
• We had dinner with friends early in the month and then traveled with another couple on our Mexico trip. We doubled this goal!
• Visit family 1 time each month
• We traveled with my parents to Mexico. We will try to make it to the Grandparents this month.
• Travel to Mexico 🗹
• DONE!! Traveled in January to Puerto Vallarta. Watch for videos and posts for Thrifty Traveler coming soon.

• Complete one additional trip - Location TBD
• We are still unsure of when Race will be able to travel again and are waiting on that before decided on our second trip. A few options for longer trips are Peru or back to Europe (maybe France?). If he is unable to travel for extended periods of time, we are looking at heading back to New York for a long weekend or maybe Canada.
• Create and purchase England trip photo book
• I started a photo book and have a few pages made. It is probably around 20% finished.
• Create and purchase Germany trip photo book
• Not started.
• Handmade Christmas - at least 75% of gifts given are hand made
• Haven't started gifts yet.
• Make wax melts
• Not started.
• Make candles from kit received for Christmas
• Not started.
• Can 40 quarts of green beans and 100 quarts of tomatoes
• We will begin this goal in late summer (once the garden begins producing).
• Complete 1 house project (finish basement, reside the house, reshingle the roof)
• Have not decided on which project yet.
• Install basement windows
• Too cold for window installation.

Contribution Goals

• Volunteer 10 nights/ month max 
• Ashley volunteered 5 nights this month shared between Society of Women Engineers and uCodeGirl. Both are outreach for STEM fields for middle school through college. While this was well under 10 nights, all five nights took place over 2 weeks. This made for very busy weeks. We will keep this goal as-is for now, but may need to be reduced as doubling this month will make the month very hectic.

We would still love to hear any goals you have for this new year. If you would like to be held accountable for your actions or just want to share your thoughts for the year, feel free to share. You can update your progress with us every month too!

If you aren't familiar with our goal series, be sure to check out our posts:

New Year, New You: Swap Resolutions for Goals Part 1 - Importance of Goals
New Year, New You: Swap Resolutions for Goals Part 2 - How to Set Goals
New Year, New You: Swap Resolutions for Goals Part 3 - Achieving Your Goals