How are you doing on your 2010 Financial goals?
Now that my toddler is a toddler I haven’t had the chance to write as much about this as I originally planned in the beginning of the year. Before I lose track I wanted to quickly post our savings challenge and our update to it.
Check out the category from earlier posts this year.
Our goals that will take most of the year to complete:
1. Note a new situation: Switching our daughter into a different daycare. We made the decision to switch her to a more expensive daycare that we felt fits our needs and she is so happy and learning so much.
Increase in childcare expenses.
2. Investing: It looks like we will reach about 50% of our goal this year.
3. Save towards landscaping our front yard. We need to get a couple estimates to figure out how much we need to save. We plan on doing some of it ourselves and having someone come and help too.
Similar to this post I haven’t had a chance to update Gardening 2010 as much as I hoped. The deer ate the square foot garden back in May and my plants are just recovering now. At least I have some experience from this!
We are having some landscape lighting done later this year and we have planned and budgeted for it.
4. Pay taxes or save taxes: We got taxes back! That has helped out a lot in our saving goals.
5. Save towards remodeling our master bathroom. Our bathroom is fine for now but it needs some tile work and we’ve thought long and hard and realized that it needs a good makeover and we plan on getting some estimates.
We have enough now in our savings thanks to the taxes (goal 4) we got back and other savings that we can go for this goal this year thanks to cutting back on goal 2 and 3 above. We just got our first estimate. Now we have decisions to make.
Goals we are continuing to do successfully:
1. Continue to pay off credit cards each month!
Of course. Note: Make sure you use your credit cards at least twice each year to avoid any non-usage fees and then PAY them off. I’ve learned that some of my banks are including this fee now due to the changes of the laws. I have to check each of my cards and make a decision if we want to keep them all.
2. Try to spend only $40 a week on groceries and try and spend less on eating out.
I want to stay on track and do meal planning each week. It hasn’t gone as well as I hoped but we are trying.
3. Max out our retirement accounts.
Maxing out will be done this year but we aren’t going to look at saving in other options because of other goals in mind this year. This one is being moved down.
4. Continue to save each month into our daughter’s 529k plan.
Yes, this is continuing each month with the other goals we have we won’t be increasing it.
What are your goals for 2010? Have they changed during the course of the year?
