The Big Goal
Financial Independence and Early Retirement
Passive income and side hustling cover 100% of my expenses. That means retirement. Hopefully by age 34/35 (year 2020).
Current Status: 17% (as of December ’15). Here are my financial reports. Here’s my strategy.
2016 Goals
Financial Goals
Here are my financial reports.
Mortgage: Get Balance to $420,000 (from $438,000 at the start of the year).
Passive Income: Get to $1,100 per month in forward passive income (dividends and interest combined), a 37% rise from the $800. Call it 17% from new capital, 11% dividend growth, 4% from dividend reinvestments, 2% from covered calls, and 3% from reallocation of my no-dividend growth stocks.
Expenses: Drop to $4,500/month from $5k/month today. One less car payment and a couple hundred less in dining/travel (more home cooking, more usage of travel rewards from hacking).
Consumer Debt: Drop to $0 from $23k today. If we sell the Corvette and make some reasonable payments on our interest-free credit card debt, then this is doable. I’m happy to slightly fail here.
Retire29 Goals
Content: Write 100 Posts.
Facebook: 300 Facebook Likes. From 61. Like Retire29 On Facebook!
Subscribers: 500 Subscribers. From 183. Help me out by subscribing here. You probably won’t regret it!
Twitter: Reach 1,000 Twitter Followers. From 159. Help me out, Follow Me on Twitter!
Page Views: 200,000 page views. That’s about 3x 2015. I can do it. More guest posting elsewhere, better social integration (I just set up Pinterest yesterday 🙂 ), and consistent, helpful posts should go a long way.
Revenue: $1,000 in blog revenue. More affiliate income by creating helpful tutorials on things I do in my everyday life will make up half of this. The rest will be from advertising.
Side Hustling
Credit Card Hacking: How much more can I actually push this? $5,300 last year. Well, let’s find out. I’m shooting for another $3,000 in cash and rewards. I already have $400 lined up for the first two weeks or January. Not a bad start.
Selling Stuff: There’s still so much stuff sitting around here. I think $2,500 for the year is very doable ($50/week).
Writing: Let’s shoot for an even $1,000 for the coming year. That’s about double my 2015 earnings.
Personal & Family Goals
Kid: Have another one. Second time’s a charm.
Interaction: Call my parents 36 times. Yep, 3 times per month. That’s about 31 times more than this year.
Health: Run a 5-minute mile. This will be just about impossible. However, I decided that I’m not making any more weight goals. This goal will actually be fun to fail.
House: Get our basement finished (finally).