BeckyI don’t know about you, but resolutions seem like a joke! We hear it all too often how people will set weight loss goals and sign up for gym memberships or at-home workout programs. Then, by the time Valentine’s Day rolls around, half of those people have already fallen off of the bandwagon and gone back to what they were previously doing!
When my husband and I make annual goals, it feels different than a traditional new year’s resolution. This is where we compile our goals for the year in various categories and look back on them each month and reflect on how we’re doing and where we need to pick up the slack for the remaining months in the year.
In past years we would go out to dinner in December and at the end of our meal I’d pull out little notebooks that we could write down our annual goals in. We would write down our own separate goals and have specific goals as a couple too.
When we first started doing this, we had 7 categories we made goals for-career, physical, spiritual, family, social, intellectual and finances. Last year while listening to Andrew East and Shawn Johnson-East’s podcast called Couple Things, they had an episode titled “Our 2021 Goals”, where they discussed that they too made annual goals. However, they had a different twist on annual goals. The categories they use go as follows-finances, travel, family, friends, marriage, fitness/health, philanthropy, home, faith and personal.
Yes, I know that’s A LOT of categories to make goals for! We tried it this past year in 2021 and I really liked it. It felt like a lot of work in the beginning, but once we had our goals down, it was nice to have more detailed categories. I will say, it was a lot of work to track 10 different areas in our lives.
If you’ve made it this far with me, know that you don’t have to make goals for ALLLL of these categories! You can even choose one this year if it seems too daunting to have that many categories. However, the reason for this post is to discuss our FINANCIAL GOALS for 2022. If you choose even ONE of these topics, finances should be at or near the top.
If you’re like us and trying to get out of debt, it’s always a good idea to either sit down at the end or beginning of the year and plan out where you are with your debt, where you want to be at the end of the year with your debt and what it will take to pay off that debt throughout the year.
A few of our personal financial goals for the year were fully funding our emergency fund, paying off half of our Toyota Highlander, paying our house down an additional $5,000 on top of the monthly mortgage payment and starting a savings account for our son.
What I’m trying to say is, NOW IS YOUR OPPORTUNITY to sit down and put together a game plan on how you’re going to pay your debt off FAST! In order to do this, make a list of all of your debts. This could include car loans, credit card balances, student loans, personal loans, a mortgage, etc. Add up all your debt balances. We like to list our debts smallest to largest and pay off the little ones first, working our way up to the bigger debts. As we pay off the smaller debts, we’re able to put bigger payments down each month on those remaining larger debts. Make a game plan for how much you plan to pay off for the year.
When we did this the first time around, we were able to pay our debt off FASTER than we anticipated because we didn’t account for the pay raises, bonuses, and surprisingly cheaper months than we had originally planned for. You’ll be surprised at how much quicker you can pay off debt when you already have a plan in place. It’s basically adding fuel to the fire because with each passing month, you get more amped up that you’re paying debt off so quickly!
Aside from making financial goals to pay off debt, we like to make financial goals surrounding money in general. Like I previously said, we make goals to build our emergency fund up, pay off a certain additional amount on our mortgage, even saving up for Christmas in December could be an annual financial goal!
No matter what you do, make sure you take advantage of the money you’re planning to make in 2022. Make a detailed plan of your annual goals and then play it out by breaking those annual goals into attainable monthly goals. May the odds be ever in your favor!
