It’s Never Too Late for New Year’s Resolutions!

I know, I know. I missed the boat on writing a New Year’s Resolutions post that published on January 1st. Actually, that’s not quite true. See, my posting schedule is always a couple of week’s ahead. So, I wrote this post on time. It simply wasn’t published in time for you to see it for New Years.

That said, all of the other sites had those posts up, and this is about the time when we start letting that New Year’s fervor die down. So, hopefully, this post will encourage you to continue to stride toward your goals.

Here are my goals for 2019. We will break them up into financial goals, personal goals, and goals for The Physician Philosopher for 2019.

Top 5 Financial Goals

The biggest goal of the year is going to happen in less than 20 days! Our $200,000 in student loans will be gone in the blink of an eye after I cut a check from our emergency fund to finish off the remaining $12,000 that’s left.

We have waited for this moment for a long time and having those loans vanish into the night will be a wonderful feeling! It took 19 hard fought months of discipline. But it was well worth it!

After our student loans are gone, here are our top five goals for the year:

• Pay off our car loans by the end of 2019 (~$48,000 remaining) using The 10% Rule from our bonus money.
• Invest >30% of our annual gross income, including maxing out my 403B, my wife’s governmental 457 & 401K, HSA, and backdoor Roth IRA.
• Start our taxable account to fill up any additional space to get to our annual savings number.
• Begin tithing 10% of our pre-tax monthly income.
• Get back to our full 529 funding schedule by end of 2019 (we backed off of this to pay for child care costs and student loans in 2018).

Top 4 Personal Goals

This year will hopefully be the year of balance. I am trying really hard to find the appropriate amount of effort at work while also being present in the lives of both my family and friends.

With that in mind, here are my top 3 personal goals:

• Be more intentional. Specifically, each month, I am going to try and call a friend or family member that I don’t regularly talk to because of distance. This is a sad, sad goal to say out loud – but I rarely (if ever) call people.
• I want to count the number of times that I miss an extracurricular (after-school) kid’s event on one hand. I’ll be at every single soccer match, golf practice, and performance that I can attend.
• This year, I plan to continue exercising three times each week (on average). This includes a new membership to the YMCA after we got a discount that more than covered the YMCA fee when we signed my oldest up for before and after school care provided by the Y.
• Enough golf will be played to get an official handicap score by halfway through the year. This will require about 15 rounds of golf.

Top 5 for The Physician Philosopher

It is hard not to get stuck on numbers while blogging. All of us track metrics (page views, shares, email subscribers, etc).

The fortunate aspect to this is that it allows for very specific goals. Here are mine for 2019:

• The Physician Philosopher Book: The 20% of Personal Finance Doctors Need to Know to Get 80% of the Results – will be published in February 4th 2019.  Learn how to get a free copy on the home page.
• Metrics for the website:
  • 2,000 email subscribers by the end of 2019 (we currently have 565)
  • 50,000 monthly views by end of the year (15-19,000 right now)
• We will publish an e-course meant for graduating residents/fellows and early career attending physicians.
• The site will give away $5,000 in charitable giving in 2019.
• And, in 2019, I will likely drop the cloud of anonymity. Hopefully, the world is ready for me to continue keeping it real even if I put a face on this site.

To meet many of these goals, I’ll need your help spreading the word about this site.

What will I be doing to help out? I’ll be giving as many guest podcast appearances as I can, writing guest posts, and getting that book out there. I’ve also invested some serious money to take a course on optimizing this site, and providing the best user experience that I can.

Expect some big changes over the next six months.

Take Home

As always, I encourage everyone to sit down and to write out some specific and intentional goals for the year. Make sure that they are “SMART” goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound).

If you aren’t sure how to attack your personal finance goals, I encourage you to consider taking the Fire Your Financial Advisor Course. This will help guide you through that important process.

What are some of your goals? Please share them! Let us know by leaving comments below.

TPP