My 2012 Goals—Failure or Success?

Almost a year ago, I set a ton of goals for 2012. I might have been bordering on insanity when I thought it would be easy to achieve them all.

Things change (as do people) throughout the year, so you never really know what to expect. Last January, I had no clue that we would be buying a house or that my honey would get promoted.

Well it’s close enough to the end of the year now, so let’s see how I did.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ Financial Goals ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

♦ Get our Emergency Fund up to $2,000. Currently, we  have a little over $1,000 in our Emergency Fund, so we pretty much just need to double that. SUCCESS

♦ Pay off the Evil Credit Card. There’s only about $400 left to go, so this one is definitely achievable and it will feel amazing to be done with it. SUCCESS

♦ Get our Roth IRA balance to $1,000. We started our Roth IRA last year but have only managed to contribute almost $400, so that leaves about $600 to go. SUCCESS (I contribute $25 each paycheck and it is now a habit.)

♦ Start saving for Christmas early. No more figuring it out when it’s almost here, I want to set money aside each month for Christmas. SUCCESS (I started making daily transfers into our Christmas Fund to get us there)

♦ Improve my husband’s credit. SUCCESS (Good thing since we bought our first house, plus it was crazy easy to improve his credit.)

♦ Increase our 401k contributions, even if it’s only a percent or two, it all adds up. SUCCESS-ISH (We increased our 401k contributions from 6% to 8%, but then we temporarily decreased them to 1% to help with getting our house.)

♦ Figure out what’s really going on with our grocery spending and fix it. I was doing pretty great before, but things started getting crazy as time went by. DRAW I figured out the problem- convenience foods and all my organic and vegetarian foods. I didn’t fix it because these things make our lives easier and healthier.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ Blogging Goals ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

♦ Get my Alexa rank under 100k. The lowest I’ve gotten it was like 118k but then it started going up from there, I think I just need more traffic. SUCCESS I think the lowest I got it down to was around 70k, but now it’s around 160k. 

♦ Increase my MozRank to 5.5. As of January 1st, it’s at 4.96. FAIL While I wasn’t able to get it up to 5.5, I did get it up to 5.14 which is still pretty good.

♦ Have 100 Twitter Followers. I’m sitting around 40 right now, so there’s still quite a ways to go. SUCCESS I have over 660 followers on twitter. So awesome! Thanks everybody.

♦ Have 200 subscribers. I keep hovering around the 120′s, so around 80 to go. SUCCESS I have over 380 subscribers now.

♦ Get on WiseBread’s 1st page of Top Personal Finance Blogs. FAIL I got so close (218), but didn’t make it. If I wouldn’t have taken such a long break when we bought our house, I’m almost positive that I would have made it.

♦ Do my 1st ever guest post on a great blog. This one is the scariest of all my goals. DRAW I wrote my member post for Yakezie, so this kind of counts.

♦ Host a blog carnival. I still can’t believe that I’ve never done this before, I guess this one is pretty scary too. SUCCESS I’ve hosted like 15 of them.

♦ Attend the Financial Blogger Conference (FinCon12) this year in Denver. I wasn’t able to go last year, and I was really upset about it. :-( I’ll also need to put money aside to cover the cost. FAIL Things just didn’t align right and I had to cancel the trip. I lost the money from the plane tickets though, unless I hurry up and book some other trip.

♦ Earn enough money from my blog to pay for my entire hosting renewal fees, which are due the end of June. SUCCESS Yay, no more paying to blog.

♦ Get my Google PageRank up to a 3. Right now, it’s only a 1 and I’ve been blogging for almost a year and a half. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong, but a 1 is really crappy. SUCCESS I moved up from a PR1 to a PR2 and then got stuck, but near the end of the year I finally got to a PR3.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ Personal Goals ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

♦ Learn how to do yoga. It would be really good for me and it’s always looked intriguing. FAIL 

♦ Read 36 books this year. I LOVE reading, but sometimes finding time to read for pleasure is difficult, and I’m a very slow reader. 3 books a month seems like an attainable goal if I cut out some of my wasted time. FAIL I only ended up reading about half of them.

♦ Cross off at least one thing on my bucket list this year. More than 1 would be awesome, but I’ll still be happy just to get one done. PASS I had forgotten that paying off the evil credit card and making enough money to pay for my blog hosting was on there, so it was really more of a technicality than a real pass.

♦ Figure out what I want to do with my life. So far, I just go through the daily stuff and have no clue what I really want. FAIL I’m still stumped and stuck in the day to day.

♦ Finish all of my paintings and hang at least 1 of them up (even if it sucks, which it will since I’m not talented at all). I have never completely finished a painting and the same seems to go for many other things in my life. I’m great at starting things, but I seem to lack the whatever-it-is to finish. FAIL I didn’t even finish one of them.

♦ Quit drinking diet soda for an entire month. FAIL I’m not even sure I went more than 1 day without drinking soda.

•••••••

I did great on the financial goals, pretty good on my blogging goals, but totally sucked *ss on the personal goals. Why do I always suck when it comes to the personal goals?

Really though, I think I made way too many goals and I only checked the list like once or twice throughout the year. No wonder.

Next year, I’ll try to shoot for less and keep them visible.

 

What goals did you make for 2012?
How did you do? 

About Jen Perkins

Likes: saving money, being debt free (aside from our house), zombies, travel, getting money, blogging and dogs. Dislikes: debt, being broke, bunnies, wasting money, not having enough money to travel the world and paying interest. Facebook  ♥  Twitter  ♥  Google+  ♥  RSS

Comments

My 2012 Goals—Failure or Success? — 18 Comments

  1. I’d say overall you did pretty good! Your PR3 is better than mine, and you made enough money to make blogging free! I’m going to set a huge stretch goal of reaching 10,000 pageviews each month for my blog. Let’s hope for the best!

  2. Congrats! I guess life happened on the personal goals and your 2013 list may be quite different. My only goal last year was to be financially independent without having to go back to an office and I reached it, now for 2013 I did set a few goals, 30% net worth increase being the most ambitious one!
    Pauline recently posted..2013 financial goalsMy Profile

  3. Congratulations! You did well for 2012. I hope your 2013 will be as great, if not better. I started the habit of saving for Christmas as early as January last year. When June stepped in, I began shopping for Christmas gifts for babies and preschoolers in the family. The best part of it, I did not feel the stress of shopping for gifts this season.
    Manette @ Barbara Friedberg Personal Finance recently posted..A WEALTH BUILDING GIFT FOR YOU-part 1My Profile

  4. This is my first time at your site. I found you, very highly ranked, at the women and finance blog site at Wise Bread.

    I just started blogging last year and I am going to set blogging goals for myself after reading your blog goals for 2012. I haven’t hit 10 reads each day so my goals will be lower than yours.

    I missed my debt reduction goal of $5000 in 2012 and was only able to reduce debt by $4000.

    I have a lot of work to do on the financial, personal and blog goals.
    Jane Savers recently posted..Why Wait For January?My Profile

    • I never looked at the sub-lists on Wise Bread before, I’m actually ranked #8…how cool. :-)

      When I first started blogging (many moon ago), I didn’t really set any goals for traffic. I just tried to keep posting and get into the habit, then I slowly started interacting with other bloggers.

      Reducing your debt by $4,000 is awesome! Even though you didn’t hit 5k, it’s still a huge step. :-)
      Jen Perkins recently posted..Potentially The Best Christmas Gift Ever: Mini Survival KitsMy Profile