One of the greatest 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 my progress so far.

Big Goals

Pay off all Credit card debt - I started the year with $18,504.78 in credit card debt. After 2 months I have $17,364.96 for a reduction of -$1,139.82 in two months ($569.91 per month). At that rate it will take almost 3 years to pay off the credit cards! Obviously that would be a huge failure given the goal to pay off the credit cards this year. With 10 months remaining in 2008, I need to average about $1,736 principal paid per month for the rest of the year. That is still possible and I think it can be done, but time is running out!

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 February, my body fat was 36.7% for an average of 1.15% lost per month. I need to average a little under 1.2% lost per month so I am just about right on track for my goal this year.

Small Goals

Increase the emergency fund to $5,000 - I set up an auto-transfer of $150 from every paycheck to the emergency fund. That alone is almost enough to reach $5,000 ($3,900 from the transfers). As of today, the emergency fund is at $875.11. That is lower than last month, but not because I have been spending the money, I am just changing accounts so some of the money has a different name now. I will be building the fund back up soon.

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 have earned $1,722.59 toward this goal through February. We need to pick up the pace here, but I anticipate a couple of larger projects to come through later that will get us most of the way there.

Start a Roth IRA with at least $1,000 - Not yet, but soon!

Buy life insurance - Still have the quotes, need to follow up with our insurance agent.

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 2 months into 2008. We aren’t off to an amazing start, but we have 10 months left so there is still plenty of time to achieve our goals.

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