My Family’s Money

I mentioned earlier that I had neglected to comment on our progress toward our goals for 2008 and now its time to make amends. Many of our goals need to be restated and a few have proven far to easy for me to complete – I need to challenge-ify them or I will stand guilty of *gulp* easy goalsim. That simply will not do.

Goal – Master my own hodgepodge of spreadsheet madness
Status – Accomplished!
Response – Gah! Getting my spreadsheet to predict my income down to the penny was far to easy. I basically just had to add an extra column to my spending tracker and a few more columns to my overview spreadsheet and presto, magic spreadsheet predictor is born. I think I need to improve my sheets further by cutting down on the clutter and streamlining readability. I have this sinking feeling that if a stranger took a look at my spreadsheet system that they would have a hard time know what the heck was going on and why I had all those colors and columns everywhere. This will require me to simplify and condense some of my information into a much more user-other-than-me friendly. This will enable me to share my template with others succinctly while at he same time keeping my options open to track useless information like how much we currently spend on meals per person per day. I don’t know why I like that, but I do.

Goal – Save $10,000
Status -20.88% complete
Response – This goal will probably get done this year, but I’m not willing to count on it just yet. With my wife’s income stream dwindling and the potential that it may dry up over the coarse of the year as a strong possibility I am uncertain just how close this will be. We will be getting an extra $2,240 from Uncle Sam over the next several months which will add a nice little boost to our number. Overall, I am very happy with our progress on this item.

Goal – Stay within our family budget
Status - $0.93 under budget YTD
Response – January was a bad month for us because we lost the use of one of our cars and I was forced to ride the bus and buy a pass for February all in one month. That ended up pushing our spending above our budget by $123.47. For February were $124.38 under budget. I was not expecting us to make up so much of our deficit so soon, but with a long weekend spent with my wife’s family we were able to skate through the month with limited gas and food usage. This may be another goal that I need to hard-ify if I am to not be a sissy, but I will wait a month or two before I make a final decision about this one. The past two months have just been too peculiar.

Goal – Earn $100 of additional income
Status - Umm, it depends on what I meant by additional income …
Response – I was reading this post by Brip Blap awhile back and it reminded me that additional/alternate forms of income can come from many different avenues. If I were to include interest from my bank account, I would accomplish my goal when my next interest deposit makes into into my account. In fact, I might get anywhere from three to four times my goal in interest alone this year. I didn’t even think of that when making this goal. There are other forms of alternate income that I regularly earn that would make my goal of $100 obsolete. Recycling, house sitting, cash back credit cards, surveys, and gifts are regular ways that I earn extra money – all of which have earned me to date more than $100. So I am forced to either restate my goal to accommodate these additional forms of alternate income, or I need to state my goal with the words that describe what I really meant. I really wanted to say that I wanted to earn $100 blogging this year. That is now my goal and I am sticking to it. So far I have racked in a whopping $1.61. I have a long way to go on this one.

Goal – Increase our net worth to $40,000
Status - $17,614 away
Response – If we reach this goal I will be completely amazed. It appears impossible given current and predicted future conditions. What was I thinking …

Consider my goals challenge-ified. I can’t wait to see what the next few months bring. Who knows, I may need to challenge-ify them some more.