Goals for 2021

The start of a new year always inspires me to set goals. I don’t always achieve everything I set out to do each year, but I do make some progress.

I recently saw an infographic on the Dave Ramsey Facebook page that listed seven areas of life to set goals in. (There is an article here.) I used this as a framework for my goalsetting this year. In the past I have set some big, big goals. Looking back, they weren’t really attainable. I was careful this year to keep my goals more manageable. I used the SMART goals acronym (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound) to help me form my goals.

Career:

Last fall, Grampy and I started talking about me going to work outside the home. We have decided to postpone this until at least this summer or fall. Honestly, I am very relieved. In a way I was excited to finally go back to working in an early childhood classroom. But I so enjoy being at home. There are so many things I can do to save money while being home.

Family:

I live next door to my dad and stepmom, but my mom and stepdad live about an hour and a half away. I have set a goal to go and visit at least every other month. In addition, my older daughter lives near them, so it will give me a chance to see her as well.

Spiritual:

My daughter and I have made a goal to work on Scripture memorization together, and with her two children. Our goal is to memorize two verses per month. We will use this idea for the kids.

Financial:

I have been working to reach a specific amount of savings. We should be able to reach this goal by the end of 2021 (I hope!)

Working toward increasing our savings will slow down our debt repayment. We have a goal to not incur any new debt and to decrease our total debt by at least $200-$300 per month. We felt it is more important at this time to increase savings than to decrease debt. Once we reach our savings goal, we can route more money to debt repayment.

To help reach our savings goal and pay down our debt, I have set a specific grocery/household spending amount for each week. Sticking to a set amount has been hard for me in the past. I am going to work harder to stay within budget in this area by cutting down on little trips to the store for one or two things. My goal is to shop once per week, preferably alone.

Social:

Setting a social goal was kind of difficult for me. I am inclined to live in my own little bubble–a crazy cat lady at home with her cats. 🙂 I decided a good goal for this area was to call or message a friend once per week.

Physical:

With the holidays, I feel I’ve strayed from healthy eating. I am Type 2 diabetic (managed with medication and diet). My goals for my health are to schedule and attend all doctor’s appointments, maintain my weight (or lose that last 10-15 pounds), and follow my eating guidelines to keep my A1C in the proper range. Eating better will be much easier when there are not holiday goodies sitting on the counter or lurking in the pantry to tempt me.

Intellectual:

I have several goals in mind for my blog. My main goal is to write more blog posts. I’ll write consistently (1-2 posts per week.) One post will be my weekly savings and goals journal and the other will be a recipe, a gardening topic, or something around the house.

I love the challenge of learning new things. I’m going to work on improving my skills in photography. I’d like to progress beyond using only the automatic settings on our camera. Grampy has a good basic knowledge of photography, so he can help me with this. I would like to be able to take better photos for recipe/food blog posts as well as DIY project posts. I’d also like to learn to photograph scenery/nature.

Other goals:

I have three additional areas I’m setting goals in: gardening, marriage and home.

Gardening:

One of my gardening goals is to amend the soil in our east garden using compost. I will build raised beds for part of our kitchen garden. Our garden in the spring will be for mostly fresh eating. We are very well-stocked with canned tomatoes, so the only thing I will be growing to can will be green beans. That means I’ll have some extra time to devote to other projects since I won’t be in the kitchen canning tomatoes.

Marriage:

In years past, Grampy and I went on a twice-monthly Saturday lunch date. In 2020 we got away from that due to restaurants being closed, and found that we didn’t really miss it all that much. We have decided that we are going to spend time exploring the area where we live. There are lots of trails and it’s not too far to drive to the mountains if we choose. We will be keeping an eye out for interesting things to photograph for the calendar we make each year as Christmas gifts. We will be celebrating our 25th year of marriage in the summer!

Home:

My list of goals for our home will need its own post, as it’s long! We have many, many projects that we started and did not completely finish. I am going to go room by room and make a list of all the things needing to be done. Then I will prioritize them by cost and amount of time to complete/level of difficulty. Some of them are simple, like touching up paint or adding trim. Some are huge, like putting new flooring in the living room.

This brings me to my Word of the Year:

This year’s Word of the Year is the same as last year’s!

FINISH.

We do want to buy a larger home in the future. But I want to make the place we live now as nice as possible since we will likely live here for several more years. Therefore, I am going to focus on finishing all of the partly done (and some new) projects in our home. I had tried to do this last year, but for a variety of reasons did not get very far.

Our home is a humble 1979 mobile home, and we’ve already made a lot of improvements. When we first moved here, we hadn’t planned on staying here as long as we have. There are some things we did with a “temporary” mindset. A perfect example is the paint color in our bedroom. The paint was given to us and we wanted to paint over the dark wood paneling, so we used it. But it really is a terrible color. So that will be going on the list!

I’m planning to blog (or maybe even video) my DIY adventures, so stay tuned!

Well, those are my goals for the year! I’m hoping the year 2021 will be a productive one!