One of the great things about writing this blog is having a public place to post my goals and easily review my progress each month (also publicly). I started 2008 with 2 ‘big’ goals and 5 ’small’ goals. Here is a look at our progress so far.

Big Goals

Pay off all Credit card debt - We started the year with $18,504.78 in credit card debt. After 1 month we have $18,034.11 for a reduction of -$470.67. At that rate it will take us more than 3 years to pay off our credit cards! Obviously that would be a huge failure given our desire to pay these off this year. With 11 months remaining in 2008 we need to average about $1,640 per month of principal paid. That is still possible and I think we can do it. It will require a little more dedication to frugality and some more efforts to earn extra money.

Get body fat percentage under 25%  - I started the year with 39% body fat according to my new scale (the absolute accuracy of that may be debatable, but this is my baseline number). As of my last weigh-in for January, my body fat was 37.6%. I need to average a little under 1.2% lost per month and I exceeded that in January so I am on track for this goal. I expect it to get more difficult the closer I get to 25% so I do need to increase the intensity if I want to be sure of reaching this goal.

Small Goals

Increase our emergency fund to $5,000 - I set up an auto-transfer of $150 from every paycheck to our emergency fund. That alone will put us close to $5,000 ($3,900 from the transfers). As of today, we have $1,372.07 in emergency funds. If we can hold steady, we will reach this goal in 2008.

Earn $20,000 (gross) from side businesses - I consider any money we earn outside of our regular ‘day’ jobs to fall under this category. For me, this would primarily be freelance web development work and websites and for my wife this would mostly be tutoring (at least for now).  We earned $860 toward this goal in January. If we stay at that rate every month we will only get about half of the way to our goal so we need to find ways to increase these earnings soon.

Start a Roth IRA with at least $1,000 - We have done nothing with this yet. I don’t expect to look at it until the credit cards are paid off.

Buy life insurance - We haven’t made the purchase yet, but we did get some quotes and will likely get this done soon. I know, waiting isn’t smart, but we’ve gone this long without we can hopefully survive a few more weeks or so.  :)

Write a will - Nothing done with this yet. I want to do it, but our financial lives are so simple and our assets so small this is a low priority.

That’s it for the first month of 2008. We aren’t off to an amazing start, but we have 11 months to get things done so I feel pretty good about our prospects for success.

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