Happy New Year! Hope you all stayed safe & healthy while entering 2021 & celebrating (or not celebrating) all of the different holidays that happened in December. I’ve heard a lot of people actually preferred this year’s holiday season over the usual, because they didn’t need to go to lame office parties or see family members they dislike/hate. I personally am not much of a party person and large gatherings usually make me anxious (or annoyed) anyway, so I really loved being by only immediate family I really care about this year. Instead of going out or being by people, my husband and I just spent the last week working on cheap house projects, like painting our 2nd bedroom & tearing up the old carpet. What’s with older generations covering up gorgeous original hardwood floors with carpet?? I’ll insert a photo of after we painted & tore up the carpet.
In addition to updating our 2nd bedroom, we majorly decluttered our whole house top to bottom this last weekend. We have a couple huge boxes going to goodwill this week & have boxes of different things going to family & friends. We realized while cleaning out our house, that 90% of the stuff we have was gifted or someone gave it to us for free. So from now on, we are going to ask to not receive anything for Christmas, Birthdays, etc. unless the person insists on buying us something then we will tell them something simple that we will use daily/weekly. Also, we want to try to not accept something from someone just because it’s free, if we don’t need it, we don’t need it. We are working on becoming more minimalist, not hardcore minimalist where everything is black and white and you only own 4 plates, but just only keep things in our home that we 100% use at least annually. If it’s been sitting in a storage bin for 2-3 years… you probably don’t need it and won’t even notice if it is gone.
Since it is a new year, here are some financial goals we have placed for 2021:
- Pay off our car. (Only debt will be our house then!)
- Max out our Roth IRA contributions, like we did in 2020 & 2019.
- Add $750 to our savings account each month for future travel & future baby fund.
Our Goal Partial Financial Independence Numbers:
- $100,000+ invested, for retirement.
- $25,000+ In Savings for Emergencies/Baby Fund.
- An HSA we are Maxing out every year while working for Medical Expenses. (No specific Goal Number)
- $0 Personal Debt- No Mortgage or Car Payment brings down our expenses a ton ($1,540/month).
- With husband & I working part time (or one of us not at all).
Our Current Numbers as of January 1st, 2021:
- $32,857.28 Invested.
- $10,049.04 In Savings.
- No HSA yet, we will get one Oct. 2022.
- -$147,948.32 Total Debt.
- We are both still working full time.
Total amount needed to reach Partial F.I. Goals: $235,042
Thanks for reading! 🙂
Ease Your Financial Payne 