2017 Goals Review #2

 

Hi everyone thanks for stopping by in today’s post I will be providing you with an update on the goals I set at the beginning of the year. This is the second year that I have set goals and thought It would be good to post quarterly progress reports to help me on track, and to also to share with you my progress. If you would like to read my first review please click here.

So let’s go and check out my goals. All the numbers below are as of July 1st.

Personal Finance

• Eliminate my loan of $3,818 √
• Increase savings to $6,000 $10,000

As you can see I have set two personal finance goals. Why have I set these specific goals? Well I chose them because I have decided that I need to improve my finances. I found that if anything bad were to happen I wasn’t probably prepared. So for my first goal as of April 1st I still had $1,247.03 remaining on the loan, I am very happy to report that I was able to pay off my loan by the end of April.

I was able to pay it off by the end of April because I received my income tax refund from the government. For my second goal back in January when I sat down and created my goals I had an emergency fund of only $2,500 and I thought this was too slow so first I set a goal of increasing my savings to $6,000. So to help achieve this I picked up a second job which provides me with $600 in income per month. On April 1st I had increased my savings to $4,333.20 seeing how I was getting close to $6k and I wasn’t even at June I decided to increase my goal to $10k.

On July 1st my savings have decreased to $3,417.51. Why the drop off you ask? I had a couple of unexpected expenses first off my laptop died in May so I replaced it with a new Dell laptop which wasn’t cheap since I use my laptop a lot and make them last a long time I decided to spend more money on it around $1,400 after tax. I know yikes expensive. My second expense was I needed new brakes on my car and some other stuff done to it and that cost me around $500.

So these two issues have set me back a bit but rest assured I am still going to attempt to reach $10K by year end I won’t give up 🙂

Portfolio/Investing

• Invest $4,000
• Receive $4,000 in Dividends

This year I decided to set a goal of investing $4k on April 1st I had invested $700. On July 1st I have been able to boost that number to $2,150 I am on pace to achieve my goal. I reason why I was able to invest $1,450 in the last three months is because I paid off my loan which has freed up cash to invest.

My second goal of wanting to receive $4k in dividends that is going well. On April 1st I had received a total of $1,075.99 on July 1st that number has increased to $2,126.35. Thanks to a couple of purchases and a number of dividend increases it looks like I might surpass the $4k mark.

Blog

• Have 15,000 page views
• Have 30 followers

I decided on these goals because I wanted to see if I could grow the blog and thought they would be the best to judge growth. So for page views I set the goal at 15,000 at the beginning of April I had received 3,015 views so I averaged slightly over 1,000 per month. At the end of June that number increased to 5,709. By the look of these numbers I won’t meet up goal I will be a couple thousand short. Ways to improve my numbers, post for than once a week, talk about a different topic (I have been thinking about doing some personal finance posts). Also I have been thinking about pinterest to see if I can gain new followers that way.

I have had better success with my second goal of wanting to achieve 30 followers. On April 1st I had 19 followers, at the beginning of the year I had 6. On July 1st my followers increased to 24. It looks like I will achieve my goal and I can’t thank my followers enough, you guys are awesome and I appreciate it.

Twitter

• Reach 1,500 followers

Why did I make this a goal?? Well I though it would be fun to do, to see if I could reach this number. If you would like to follow me then please click here. On April 1st I had 981 followers from April to June that number increased to 1,128. If I want to reach my goal I need to add 372 followers in six months.

So that wraps up my second review of 2017. I hope everyone is on pace to reach and surpass their goals. Thank you for reading this I appreciate your support. Please feel free to leave a comment I enjoy reading them.

Thanks

Matthew