Financial goals for ‘08
Tuesday, July 29th, 2008I was just sitting around thinking about finances and other things that randomly run past my brain when it occurred to me that throughout my entire debt free blogging I have no financial goals outside of getting (almost) debt free for ‘08.
More specifically, at the beginning of the year when I create my financial budget and distribute it to people, I usually have a round-a-bout number of how much we’ll have in savings at the end of the year. Last year, my ‘07 goal was to have $10k in the bank which I easily beat. I ended up writing checks totaling $20k check last year paying off most of our bills.
Last year completely drained our savings, and it took approximately 6 months to get out of tight spending mode. This year though, when doing our budget for the year we were on pace to have more than $20K in savings. Then I got laid off in March which put a damper on that projection.
With me taking a $15k pay cut this year, we’re now projected to have close to $14k in savings at the end of the year. Not a bad number but I’d like that to be better and it will (significantly) since we’re getting a lump sum in a few weeks due to my wife’s company being bought out.
So despite the lump sum payment we’re going to receive, I’d like our savings goal to be $13K at the end of the year. The way I usually come up with the number is, I take the projected savings we’ll end up with at the end of the year and subtract $3-5k. Since we’re in the 3rd quarter of the year It looks like we’ll be around the $13k range. If not, I may have to think of more ways to be creative with the budget in order for us to obtain that goal.
In the meantime, I’m working on tweaking my budgeting spreadsheet to be more user friendly. I’ll distribute it for ‘09 closer to when that time comes.
