End of Year Review & 2018 Goals

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Can’t believe it’s already 2018! While I’ve never been big on New Years resolutions, I do like to take some time to reset and think through some over arching goals for the new year. It’s important to reflect on where you currently are, in order to make improvements in your life. This past year I’ve been continuing to refine my daily habits, rather than defining particular areas as “resolutions.”

I got fairly specific with my 2017 goals, and saw progress in a number of areas. I’ve decided to take a similar approach this year, identifying some main goals to pursue. Most of these goals don’t have a specific end point, as I want them to be themes I continue year-to-year rather than just stopping when I hit a certain point.

There is a lot of overlap in what I’m looking to accomplish in 2018. Here are my goals from this past year, the progress I made, and the continued improvement I hope to reach in these areas.

Recapping this year, and looking ahead to 2018:

Completely pay off our remaining student loans (about $2,500 remaining)  – After paying off around $18,000 in 2016, we started the year with $8,800 left on our student loans. The plan was to kill off the rest of this debt in the first half of 2017, but plans changed. My previous company went through a round of lay-offs in the beginning of the year. When this happened, we suspended our debt repayments and started funneling our extra cash into further building up our emergency fund. In early March I lost my job, but was luckily only out of work for about 6 weeks. We got back on track with replenishing our savings and continuing our debt repayment, albeit at a slower pace. I have no doubts will finish them off once and for all in the next few months!

Build up our cash savings – We built this up a bit higher in 2017, and will continue to increase our cash savings in 2018.

Increase our net worth – With debt being paid down and cash savings being increased, our net worth will go up. We’ve seen significant growth this past year as we continue to invest in our 401k’s, Roth IRA, and my ESPP. Personal Capital is a great free tool that I personally use to track our net worth and investments.

Increase blog traffic – This year Spills Spot had roughly 24,000 page views. I’m hoping to double this number in 2018. Consistency will be a big key. I averaged slightly less than 1 post per week, and I’d like to get that average higher. My vision is to have a new post up every Monday, which happened in stretches during 2017, but didn’t happen 100% of the time.

Write a “Rockstar worthy” blog post – Rockstar Finance is one of my favorite websites. It’s been a goal of mine for awhile now to have one of my blog posts get featured. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to accomplish this goal in 2017, but hopefully 2018 it will happen. I did have one of my posts mentioned by J$ at Budgets are Sexy, and multiple posts featured on The Financial Diet.

Travel to new places – 2017 was an exciting year of travel for us as we visited New York, Ireland, and Hawaii! This year I have a work trip planned to Berlin and we hope to take short trips to Portland, Denver, and maybe Dallas. We’ve also discussed another tropical trip such as Cabo or Jamaica, so we’ll see what happens!

Instill better daily habits – Last year my focus was on reading more books and exercising consistently. I’m proud of the fact that I ended up reading 4 difficult investing books this year, and will look to continue this momentum in 2018. I’d like to get to the point of reading at least 1 book per month. My dad has discussed having something else up his sleeve, so we’ll see if this year brings about a new challenge.

These last few are cliche, but more exercise is an area of improvement I’d like to make. I’m also looking to cut down on caffeine (although I currently drink tea the majority of the time I’ve been switching to decaf and have noticed it makes me feel better) and sugar. Other positive daily habits that I’ll look to continue are drinking more water and listening to podcasts during my commute.

As always, thanks again for following along! For more, be sure to check out my Top 10 Posts from 2017 and tune in next week for a recap of our 2017 spending.

Related Reading: End of Year Review & 2017 Goals

What were your biggest accomplishments of 2017 and what are your goals for the new year?

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