2013 Goals

It's that time of year again.  Call it goal setting, New Year's resolutions, or whatever.  As I mentioned last year, I'm all for this process.  As Zig Zigler once said, "If you aim for nothing, you'll hit it every time."

I haven't forgotten about our 2012 goals.  I wish I could say that I achieved all of them.  I think overall I achieved somewhere between 50%-75%.  I was feeling a little down about that until I read this comment on Money Saving Mom's blog: "A very wise ecclesiastical leader once told me that if you are attaining 100% your goals, you are setting them too low and need to challenge yourself further. If you don’t attain any of your goals and working hard at all of them, you are setting them too high."

My husband has been off work for the past week and it has been a great time for me to catch up on things and reflect on new goals.  So without further adieu, here are my 2013 goals:

Financial:  In order to set a financial goal for 2013, we had to step back and look at the big picture. Our long-term goal is to be 100% debt-free (including no mortgage), be financially independent during retirement, and pay for our kids' college.  And thinking about accomplishing all of that kind of stresses me out.  So we developed a plan to pay off our mortgage early and we have to take it one year at a time, one month at a time.  If things go according to plan, we can pay off our mortgage before my oldest son goes off to college and that will free up some income to pay for our kids' college.  We have 10 years.  So we have a set dollar amount goal to pay extra principle to our mortgage in 2013.  

To come up with the extra money, we're making a few changes.  We are canceling our lawn cutting service and I'll be doing it myself.  I'll be home-schooling my youngest for the next school year so we will have a year without any pre-school tuition payments.  I also started a part-time job.

Health and Fitness:  My goal for fitness this year is to increase my upper-body strength.  I can't even do one pull-up on a pull-up bar.  I'm going to change my workouts to include less cardio and more strength training.  I will also keep running and participate in two 5k's.

Last year I also had housekeeping goals, but I think I did a pretty good job on those so I'm just going to maintain my weekly cleaning schedule.  This year, since I started a new job, I will also have some career goals.  But I'll share those in another post.

Do you have goals for 2013?