May 2020 Goals Check-In Part 1

One of my intentions for this year is to check in on my 2020 financial goals monthly! Although I am horrible at finances, one thing I have learned over our last 10 years of debt, is that when I pay better attention to our finances, our finances do better...

I still believe that if these 20 financial goals are met, we will drastically improve our financial situation by the end of the year! In all honesty, even if only some of these goals are met, we will be in a better place than we were when this year started. Please wish us luck as we try to do better and be better!

1.       Get credit card debt below $10000. This has been a monkey on my back for way too long!

Pass-ish: We are making progress. I would say we are on-track-ish. I don’t know if we will make it to under $10000 by the end of the year, but we did decrease our debt. It’s going in the right direction. The last couple months haven’t seen much progress, but we haven’t increased our debt, so I will call it a win.

2.       Track our family spending every other month of the year.

Fail: Quite honestly, life threw us several curve balls in the last month so tracking my spending has been the least of my worries. Exactly the same as last month! With quarantining and social distancing, tracking our spending has fallen WAY down the list! In one sense, we aren’t spending much money, but in another, very real sense, online shopping is no joke! Also, our food budget has ballooned! We have nothing to do all day but sit home and eat or try new recipes! I should be tracking this so I know how much we are spending on food, but I’m afraid to look!

3.       Increase contributions to envelopes and go “cash only”.

Fail-ish: We have actually met 50% of this goal, but because 50% is an F, I’m giving us a failing grade overall. We did increase envelope contributions, but we did not go cash only. We are still not cash only, but we are paying more in cash and charging less. Working on it… Same as last month. However, again, quarantining has lent itself to online shopping by necessity. Groceries and gas we are still using cash, but right now everything else is credit.

4.       Increase Christmas savings.

Pass: We increased from $200 per month to $300 per month. I still don’t know if it’s enough, but it is an increase of 50%. We have already bought several Christmas presents and I’m happy the money was there to use. So far we are on track but it’s early times yet. Yes! Same! We are close to half way done with our Christmas shopping and still have some money in the envelope. I’m definitely calling this a win! The real test will be when it gets closer to October and November and we see where we are!

5.       Church Tithing. My goal is to donate $300 EVERY. SINGLE. MONTH.

Pass: So far so good. We donated $300 in January, February, and March, and April. We have already budgeted the money for the rest of the year, but we need to follow through, which is not always our strong suit. Also, because of social distancing and “shelter-in-place” rules, this could become more difficult because we aren’t actually attending church. I didn’t want to set up online giving because of some recent issues I’ve had (more to come on this in a few days/weeks) so I called my church and asked if I could mail them a check. The answer was yes. I mailed a check for our April tithing last week and will do the same for May in a couple of weeks. (It’s very important to us to remember to give even amidst all this struggle because the church still has bills that need to be paid, salaries that need to be paid, and community services that they want to provide.)

6.       Pay off car!

PASS: I’m very pleased to say that we paid our last car payment and already received our pink slip! This goal is fully completed and met!

7.       Once The Husband’s car is paid off, put $345 payment into savings each month towards a new car fund.

Pass:  So far, so good. In the couple of months since our last payment, I have made sure to deposit the “car payment” into our savings. We are seeing good growth in our savings account!

8.       Save $5000 above and beyond my “normal savings” or any car savings.

On-track: After March, we had already deposited $3886 towards our goal of $5000. In April, we deposited an additional $558 (above and beyond our regular savings and not including our “car payment”. (We deposited our federal tax refund of $108 and $450 from the $5000 Savings Challenge.) That comes to a total of $4444 towards our goal. We are 88% of the way to our goal only 4 months through the year! Feeling confident about this one!

9.       Meal plan 8 months out of the year.

On-track: Because our goal is 8 months, I will still say we are on-track. Covid 19 has thrown our whole life into disarray so we did not meal plan for April or really for May, however, we talk and plan our meals the night before. We have a ton of food and more time than we normally do so the need to plan our meals on a calendar for the month has gone away.

10.   Assuming I can meet all of the above goals, my last goal would be to increase my savings rate.

Pass: I would actually give us a pass on this because we are putting our regular amount in savings plus working on completing a $5000 challenge, plus we put half of our unexpected money towards savings. Thinking good thoughts on this one!

As I think these posts are only going to get longer as the year progresses, I have decided to split them up into two posts. I will publish them during the same week but even half of them are a lot to get through!