Gather Little by Little

Photo by: Morgue File

The Mighty Bargain Hunter posted an update on how his 2008 goals were going. He says it’s a “tepid start at best“, but I think he’s doing great. While he hasn’t fully met his goals, he’s recognized he has some work to do which is important. He’s heading in in the right direction. Also in his update, he decided to “pick on me” and see how I’m doing on my 2008 goal. Seems we both are off to a “tepid start at best“.

In my article, A 2008 financial goal and a chance to win an iPod I wrote about how my primary goal for 2008 was to Pay a minimum of $1,000 a month towards out debt. This will be done by setting up two auto transfers from our checking account towards our debt. Each transfer will be in the amount of $500, one from each paycheck I receive. For the month of January, I’m not doing so good frankly, but plan to fix that and maybe even make up for it a bit in February. I still plan on paying more than the minimums on our debt snowball this month, but it won’t be close to $1000.00. It will be more like $200 – $300. Due to my laziness over the holidays, I failed to anticipate a few expenses:

• Our property taxes were due this month – I knew this a year ago and saved up $1200.00 to pay them. The $1200.00 was based on the cost of our taxes last year. It would seem during the last year, our housing value’s went up as well as the tax rate, and instead of owing $1200.00 as I expected, we owed $1900.00 instead. So that $700 difference really bit into the old budget.
• Our home owners association dues are due at the end of this month – Again, this is an expense I knew about late last year, but forgot until this weekend when I starting getting caught up and getting our finances back on track. I’m setting up an ING Direct sub-account for this today, and will start putting money in there monthly so when the dues come up next year the money is already there. Not sure why I didn’t do this last year.
• Property taxes on our Durango came due – I knew this one was coming, but thought it was next month. Total amount I didn’t plan for: $81.00. I created a tab in my budget spreadsheet called upcoming bills and added the property tax, HOA dues, property taxes, etc. in this tab along with the dates due. I’ll refer to this tab each time I do my monthly budget to help me avoid missing things in the future.

I didn’t start off the year with a bang, but fully plan to meet my goal next month. I’m one to try and focus on the positives and not the negatives and with that in mind even though I didn’t meet my goal this month, I did learn some valuable lessons. I also did what we call at work “risk mitigation strategies” in place to avoid making the same mistake twice. Thanks MBH for “picking on me”. I think it’s important to share our progress (or lack there of). MBH also encouraged me to pick on some others, so I think I’ll do that:

• Lynnae said she was going to to read one personal finance book every month for the year. – How’s that reading coming along Lynnae?
• Jaimie said No more credit card debt – How’s your progress Jaimie?
• Randall told us he wanted to start paying his mortgage from secondary income – How far along are you Randall?

I’ll ask Lynnae, Jaimie and Randall to feel free to “pick on” some others as well.

Readers, how are you guys doing on your 2008 goals/resolutions (financial or not)? Did you set a goal? Feel free to write a blog post or add a comment!