You’ve heard the advice. If you want to stop pigging out or busting open your piggy bank, write down what you eat or what you spend.

I’ve always found this tip to be unrealistic. I can’t commit to writing everything down– maybe because it’s too time consuming, too rigid, or maybe because I secretly don’t want to change.

The other advice I often hear is to let people know when you’ve made a goal. I recently ran my first 5k. If I hadn’t told people I was spending my Thanksgiving morning jogging around downtown, I probably would have trained even less than I did, or skipped it altogether.

So with that, here are my financial goals. I suppose I could have waited to list them for New Years, but why not start early? After all, December is quite the money drain for me:

There are three birthdays in my immediate family and then there’s Christmas and holiday tipping and holiday meals and end of the year charitable giving. Needless to say, without the extra dough from our three paycheck November, we’d have been in the red.

1. Sign and notarize the darn will. My “good enough for now” version is complete. But I need to corral some friends to witness and get a notary’s stamp of approval.
2. Increase our automatic investments into a Roth Ira from $333 per month to $416.66 per month (the new maximum is $5,000 for 2008). Adjust our property tax payment savings too.
3. Urge my employer to overhaul the 401(k) already! (There are better choices out there).
4. Spend less on “bargains.” It’s not a bargain if you bought a bunch of stuff you don’t need because it was cheap.
5. Buy more used. Last night, I bought two pairs of snowpants, a toy truck, a book for $15. I would have been lucky to buy one new pair for that price.
6. No more home improvements. We bought a fixer upper and fixed it and fixed it and fixed it (and then when we had kids and jobs and no time and hired people to fix it and fix it and fix it). Now it’s time to make the shift into maintenance mode and take the cash we’ve been plowing into our place and socking it away.
7. Dump the least rewarding reward credit cards and simplify our plastic life. Maybe it will ding the credit score, maybe it won’t. We aren’t planning to tap credit or apply for a new home loan any time soon (see #6). So who cares?
8. Super-charge our savings. We’re approaching six figures in our combined 401(k) and that feels good. It would feel fabuloso to consistently have five figures in our emergency savings. I’m going to transfer my love of accumulating stuff and try to accumulate a cash cushion instead. I know that’s way easier said than done. A bank balance doesn’t look as good on me as a new pair of shoes.

It feels like I should have ten goals, but maybe the other two will come to me in time for that oh-so-reflective New Years period.

In the meantime, what are your financial goals? And if you reached goals that I have on my list, tell me how I can be successful.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 3rd, 2007 at 4:04 pm and is filed under Kara\'s finances. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.