These are a little late in coming. First of all, I couldn't finalize what I wanted my goals to be. Secondly, our world went a little crazy. Lastly, I was procrastinating.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a post with some potential goals and those are mostly what I am going to go with for the year.
1. Decrease credit card debt by $8000. I would love to completely pay off my credit card debt but I'm not sure that's going to happen this year. I think an $8000 decrease is doable but will still be work for us. I also want to be realistic.
2. Add $5000 to our EF savings. For various reasons, our EF took a hit this year. I want to get it back up to $10,000 by the end of the year. I found a Pinterest savings challenge that has you save a certain amount each week that ends up being $5000 in a year. I modify it and only do one deposit monthly. I did this last year and it was a great motivator for me. (I know you are supposed to pay yourself first, but I'm not very good at that. However, putting a line item in our budget encouraged me to put more in savings.)
3. Give montly to our church. And increase the amount from 2020 to 2021. (I don't care if we only give $50 more next year, but I want to make sure that number goes up year to year!)
4. Increase my 403b contributions. (We were late getting on the "retirement savings band wagon", so we are trying to make up for lost time. The Husband contributes 16% of his salary (with a 3% match and 6% profit sharing) and I contribute an additional 10% above my CalSTRS requirement.)
5. Split any "found" money evenly between savings and debt. (This could be stimulus money, if The Husband gets overtime, overages pay for me, etc.) Usually this money gets frittered away so I want to give it a purpose.
I know it seems like some of my goals are working against eachother (saving and paying off debt) but we need to do both to improve our financial situation.
I also know most people would say it's more financially sound to pay off debt than it is to save/save for retirement. And while mathematically speaking, that may be true, it does nothing for my peace of mind. So, we are going to split our focus.
We don't have a lof of goals, but successfully completing each one will help put us in a better financial positions than we are in now.
Good luck to everyone on their 2021 goals! And may 2021 be a better year!
January 12th, 2021 at 08:09 pm 1610482167
January 12th, 2021 at 10:52 pm 1610491973
January 13th, 2021 at 01:52 am 1610502740
The cost of debt is of course interest. There are two ways you can try to lower that.
One way is to see if you can take advantage of a zero percent credit card office and transfer to it the amount of debt you can pay off in the time period when rates would be zero. This is only good if you are confident you will not use the card to add to your debt. There might be a transfer fee, but that should be much lower than your interest rate.
The other is to call your credit card company and ask them to lower your interest rate. If the first person says ‘no’, ask to speak to a supervisor. If you are a consistent payer, stress that. If you are not, stress ‘hard times.’
January 25th, 2021 at 02:38 pm 1611585534