“If you aim at nothing you will hit it every time.” Zig Ziglar
I’ve always loved that quote by Zig Ziglar because there is so much truth behind it. Goals are so important for making things happen. I know that our quest to get debt free (minus the mortgage) wouldn’t have happened had we not had goals and a plan to see them through. While things didn’t always happen precisely how or when we planned, never once did we lose focus of the bullseye.
Now that we’ve had some time to figure out what comes next, I figured it was time to put it all down in writing. For the most part, Hubs lets me do the planning. Of course, he has an input, but since he is away from home so much, it only makes sense that I’m the one who works on seeing the plan through. He brings home the money (I earn a little too), and I allocate where it goes.
Our 2020 Goals
- Get rid of PMI on our mortgage. We are eligible to request a BPO (brokers price opinion) for our house after we make January’s payment. I did call a broker, and the price for a BPO will be around $125. That is less than one month of PMI, so well worth doing.
- Complete our house remodel plans. We bought our house knowing we would want to make some significant changes. Whoever designed it had unique tastes, but nothing that we can’t “fix.” The estimate for these plans is $2,000, which will still leave us almost $1,200 of the certificate I purchased. We hope to get started on our house remodel in 2022. Meanwhile, we have a lot of saving to do.
- Use the remaining certificate funds for, well, something! We feel it is wise not to leave a credit on file for over two years. Right now, we are thinking of either an egress window for our basement or have them replace our shed roof and porch. If it makes sense to do the egress before making our big changes, we will likely do the work on the shed ourselves. Why our shed even has a porch is a good question, but it was probably to match the “interesting” design of our house.
- Fix our pickup truck. It runs, but it runs rough. We’ve had two mechanics look at it, and but now we feel it is time to bring it to the dealership. It also needs new tires.
- Repair our zero-turn mower, which is yet another thing we put off while we were getting out of debt. While our pushmower worked great, cutting grass with the zero-turn is so much faster!
- Increase our bigger emergency fund by $12,000. This goal is a high priority.
- Increase our 401K contribution by another 2%, bringing us up to 12%. We also have a 3% company match. We likely won’t make this change until after our first six goals are met.
I’m eager to attack these 2020 goals with a vengeance, but we will still leave money in our budget for things like going to visit family, occasional meals out and perhaps even an inexpensive adventure.
Any of you have any goals you want to share? In the three years since we decided to take control of our finances, I have come to see that this is an ongoing journey. New goals will always need to be made and achieved. I will say, though, that this journey is becoming far more fun since we paid off all that blasted debt!
Well, our goal is to become debt free except our mortgage, and it looks like we are going to do that, but because we are refinancing the house. There are some repairs that REALLY need to be done and we have a TON of equity in the house, so we figured a re-fi was the best course of action. I talked to our mortgage broker and what I will do is make a double mortgage payment every month plus apply bonuses to it and we should have the house paid off by the time dh retires in a few years. Plus, if something happened to us and the kids sold it, they would pay off the mortgage and still walk away with a fairly large chunk.
Goals for re-fi $$
new garage door (right now we still have the original door from the 50’s)
new front door with storm door
painting every room
new flooring in every room
remodel hall bathroom
and if there is money leftover….new window & door in our bedroom, new inside doors, new kitchen cabinets, and we would LOVE to get a new mattress and sofas…..we need to win the lottery to complete everything but it is fun to dream 🙂
You have a plan and with that, I know you will succeed! We are right there with you when it comes to things that need to be done with our house. A roof, new siding, new windows…but it makes no sense for us to make these changes until we know what modifications we want to make with the entire house. Sure is fun to dream! You have quite a list yourself to dream about!
Hi Lucy. For next year, our big goal concerns savings. We have had a lot of medical bills this fall, and the first thing is to build that back up. We have an HSA that we could tap if needed, but I have been paying our bills OOP so that we will have the HSA available to us when we retire and will be living on less. This amount is $3000. After that, we are saving for the following (in order): 1. Remodeling our master bath. 2. A trip. 3. A car to replace my husband’s car. These are all multi year goals, but we are hoping to have enough for the bath sometime in 2020. We are also continuing our savings for retirement in 401k, maxing out our Roths and maxing out HSA. We plan to take a staycation in 2020 since we had a big vacation this year with our Alaska cruise. Since we paid off our house this year, it has really helped with the amount we are able to save. I would encourage you to keep plugging along, it is worth it.
Sorry about the medical expenses you had. Never fun. I’m excited that this is the year we will be able to focus more on saving. We will keep plugging along with paying off our house. With any changes to our payment, I run new numbers. We are on track to get our house paid off by the time Hubs retires (hopefully sooner!) but with that, we also need to address some issues with our house. 2019 was a fantastic year for you. You have a lot to be proud of!
Congratulations on your amazing year and becoming debt free!
I’ve been thinking a lot about 2020 money goals. We’ve been pretty focused these past three years on saving and paying off debt, and I think we’ve done really well overall. But I also feel kind of burned out. I’m thinking we’ll identify a couple of easy goals (like increasing retirement contributions) and cut ourselves a bit more slack this year.
The $76K Project recently posted…19 For ’19 Goals: A Wrap-Up
Thank you! I hear you on burnout. It is easy to feel that way. I’d encourage you to keep going and push through. The feeling of being debt free (minus our mortgage) is incredible. Well worth sticking with it, even during the sucky times.
Nice post.
Getting all your major debts sorted must be feeling like you’ve broken free from some steel chains. For me I avoid debts like plague which has seen me reject mortgage plans in favor of renting until I can buy an affordable home.
Thanks! It was a tough 3 years, but I’m thankful we did it! Good for you for avoiding debt! Your patience for a home will pay off!
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