There’s a saying;

You can’t get anywhere without deciding where to go.

As it’s a New Year now, it’s time to re-examine the past year’s goals and see where we are. It’s also time to set new goals for the coming year.

Setting goals is a basic task for making your life and situation better. If you sit around and just ‘wish’ things would get better, or try to make things better without some kind of plan on where you want to end up, odds are things are not going to happen like you hope.

Creating a S.M.A.R.T. set of goals helps you define where the path lies, and the ultimate point you want to reach. It also keeps ‘pie-in-the-sky’ ideas from overtaking all your efforts. Dream big, but realize you have to take a lot of prep-steps to the BIG dream. S.M.A.R.T. goals help you make those steps.

• Specific – Make a goal that has a very defined outcome and keep the overall goal simple and definable
• Measurable – The goal needs to be something that can be defined as either complete or not. Being rich is not really a definable goal. Making 1 million dollars is a definable goal.
• Achievable – The goal needs to be reasonably achievable. Set the bar high, but not too high on a particular goal. If you achieve the goal, you just make another one with higher achievement standards. Don’t bite off more than you know you can chew.
• Realistic – Keep it real people. Wanting to fly is fine, as long as it’s in an airplane. Growing wings and flapping around the flagpole probably isn’t going to happen.
• Timely – Don’t plan for 20 years in the future with these goals, plan for short-term timeframes. Long-term goals are desirable, but they change with time as well. These goals should be things you can achieve within a year or so.

Looking Back at 2008

I had a number of goals defined for last year that didn’t get completed

The Blog

• Increase subscribed readers to 1000 – Nope, only around 300 this year. Going to continue this one
• Consistently post at least 5 entries a week, moving to 10 entries a week (average 2/day) by third-quarter of the year. – Also nope. I was consistent for most of the year, but this last couple of months have been sporadic. Gotta re-concentrate ont his one
• Contribute to at least 1 blog carnival a week, and HOST 1 carnival a month, starting 3rd  quarter of the year. – Also nope. I’m kind of torn about the usefulness of carnivals any more. They’re fun to do, but a lot of effort, for not a lot of readership. Might drop this one for the coming year.
• Officially join the M-Network and continue to network with existing and new PF Bloggers. – Yeah, didn’t happen. Not expecting it to either. That’s OK. I do this for fun, while for most of the other M-Network folks, this is either a significant part of their income, or their full-time job.
• Get a guest post published on The Simple Dollar, No Credit Needed, and Blueprint for Financial Prosperity. (More wish than goal) – Same as Blog Carnivals, I’m not sure how useful this is anymore. I like getting more people to read the blog, but the traffic I’ve seen doesn’t justify the time and effort involved. Dropping this one.
• Get enough advertisers to break-even on the expenses for the blog – Amazingly enough, this one hasn’t been that difficult to accomplish. I’ve broken even and made money with the blog. I won’t be quitting the day job anytime soon, but it’s enough to justify continuing.

Personal Goals

• Fully fund my 401k – Ended up cutting back on this because of the market. Concentrated on paying off bills and saving up an emergency fund.
• Fully fund my wife’s and my Roth IRA – Same as 401k above.
• Start a 529 fund for both children – Ditto here too
• Pay off all credit cards – I haven’t paid off ALL the cards, but anything over an 8% interest rate is gone. That leaves only a handful of cards that I’m not in that much of a hurry to pay off quite yet.
• Increase our emergency fund to 6 months of money. – Woohoo! I have increased the emergency fund to 9 months (or maybe a year if I’m REALLY careful). This is just in case things go south at my job, not that I’m expecting that. With the economy the way it is,
• Replace paying my mortgage ~$1500/month from the primary salary and start paying it from secondary income sources (blog revenue, side consulting, delivering pizzas, etc) – Achieved this one, just not in the way I expected. I now commute more than 1 1/2 hrs a day, but I get per-diem mileage. That comes out to a little over $2000/month above and beyond salary. I was starting to see some side consulting money early in the year, but that dried up. Blog revenue isn’t bad (around $2000 this year) but that’s not enough to put me over the point. Since per-diem isn’t ‘exactly’ primary salary, I’m giving this one a pass.

Looking Ahead to 2009

The Blog

• Break 1000 Subscribers – Come on everyone, tell your friends, family, random strangers on the street, etc.!
• Consistently post at least 3 times a week – There’s a lot of blogs on finance out there (wonder why?!??) and a lot of them just regurgitate the daily news or basic financial information. While I’m guilty of this too, I’m trying to put out articles that make people think about why people and the financial markets act the way they do. This isn’t an every-day kind of thing, so I’m dedicating to a Mon-Wed-Fri (and sometimes Sat roundup) schedule.

That’s it for the blog. I’m not getting too ambitious this year.

Personal Goals

• Fully Fund the 401k – Up my percentage to max out this year.
• Pay off Credit Cards – Finish off the last of my credit cards this year
• Fully fund my wife’s and my Roth IRA – Same as 401k above.
• Start a 529 fund for both children – Start and fund SOMETHING this year
• Purchase a Rental Property – This is the big S.M.A.R.T. goal for this year. With things looking good job-wise, and the elimination of a lot of debt. I’m going to start seriously looking around for a rental property in my area. Prices have been dropping like a rock, and there are some relatively good deals to be had if you can come up with the credit and down payment. I’m thinking the bottom of the housing drop is coming somewhere in the third-fourth quarters of the year, and by that time I’ll have all the credit card debt gone, and enough saved for a significant down on a property. We’ll see how it goes

So, what are your goals for 2009?