I didn’t do as well with my financial goals for 2011 as I’d originally thought I would. But hey, it’s a new year full of opportunities and possibilities. So here are my financial goals, blogging goals and personal goals for 2012, and it would be awesome to achieve them all.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ 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.

♦ 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.

♦ 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.

♦ 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.

♦ Improve my husband’s credit. Right now, my husband doesn’t really have any credit history. I plan to add him on to most of my accounts so that my lovely history can be shared with him. I won’t be sharing my dirty credit or the evil credit card I got last year, that wouldn’t be any help. The limit on the evil credit card is the highest of all my accounts, but it’s so new that it would decrease the average age of the accounts, so I’ll leave it out for a couple years.

♦ Increase our 401k contributions, even if it’s only a percent or two, it all adds up.

♦ 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. I’ll figure something out.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ 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.

♦ Increase my MozRank to 5.5. As of January 1st, it’s at 4.96.

♦ Have 100 Twitter Followers. I’m sitting around 40 right now, so there’s still quite a ways to go.

♦ Have 200 subscribers. I keep hovering around the 120’s, so around 80 to go.

♦ Get on WiseBread’s 1st page of Top Personal Finance Blogs. I think I might need stats way better than I’m creating goals for to do this, but maybe just having it as a goal will help me stay focused.

♦ Do my 1st ever guest post on a great blog. This one is the scariest of all my goals.

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

♦ 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.

♦ Earn enough money from my blog to pay for my entire hosting renewal fees, which are due the end of June. A month or so ago, I added Google Adsense to my blog to attempt to cover my hosting fees. I’m really not exactly sure how that works, I think that I’m supposed to make a cent or two if somebody clicks on the ads (even if they don’t buy anything), that will take forever to earn enough for the hosting. I could accept a sponsored post or two, that would most likely be more realistic. I’m not sure, I’m pretty new to this stuff. I’m not too big on affiliate stuff, so that seems to narrow down my options a lot.

♦ 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.

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

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

♦ 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. Here’s what’s on my reading list so far for 2012, hopefully I can stick with it:

Personal Finance:

• Rich Dad Poor Dad
• The Richest Man in Babylon
• I Will Teach You To Be Rich
• Zombie Economics
• Your Money or Your Life
• The Total Money Makeover
• The Automatic Millionaire
• The Money Class
• The Money Book for the Young, Fabulous & Broke
• The Millionaire Next Door
• Rich Woman

Work/Career/Blogging:

• Purple Cow
• ProBlogger
• The 4-Hour Workweek
• Time Management from the Inside Out
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
• How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Digital Age
• Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office
• The Other 8 Hours

Self Improvement:

• The 5 Love Languages
• The Happiness Project
• The Joy of Less
• Live More, Want Less
• The Power of Less
• Awaken the Giant Within

Strictly 4 Fun:

• War and Peace
• Blue Bloods (Book 1)
• Masquerade (Book 2)
• Revelations (Book 3)
• The Van Alen Legacy (Book 4)
• Misguided Angel (Book 5)
• Lost In Time (Book 6)
• Under the Dome

♦ 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.

♦ 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.

♦ 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.

♦ Quit drinking diet soda for an entire month. This one will be kinda tricky because I always drink a soda in the morning to take all my vitamins (they’re so nasty tasting). Diet soda is so much worse for me than regular soda is, but regular soda tastes way too sugary to me. Hopefully, going an entire month without soda will help me to stay away from it and make better choices (like water) about what I drink.

 

What are your goals for 2012?