Share your financial goals for 2020, win a Tiller Money mug!
Update - we’re going to keep this thread open for another few days and extend the offer to win a Tiller Money mug to 50 people.
Share your 2020 financial goals in this thread, and you’ll automatically be entered to win one of 50 Tiller Money mugs.
We’ve written about how to set effective goals in the past. The basic formula for goal-setting success is to keep them simple and specific, with dedicated time scheduled to review progress.
For example, my financial goals include:
Spend less on our home heating bill. I want to reduce it by $30 in January, February, and March. It’s a relatively small amount of money but represents a bigger and more meaningful goal for me, which is to be mindful of my environmental footprint. Every week I’ll check my account online to see how much fuel we’re using at home.
Buy a new house! That’s a big one. In a way, it’s a cumulation of many other goals. My real goal at this point is to buy smart and get a great mortgage rate. Specifically, I want to have everything in place by early spring.
Bring in more money. See the goal above - it’s going to be an expensive year! I want to avoid credit card debt, and besides basic frugality, I will need to bring in more money. I’m thinking about this now, and I want new income coming in by the beginning of February. I’ll work on this each weekend in January.
New to tiller, so goal at the moment is to get everything set up and know my numbers. Can’t do much else until I see the data! Then, I want to choose 3 actionable items by the end of January to tackle. The electric bill is definitely one of them!
Spend less on eating out/getting coffee at work. We have a great cafeteria and great coffee shops in my office building, but it adds up quickly. I would like to reduce it to once a week for food and once a week for coffee. I’ll check in at the end of each month and see how I’m doing by checking my transactions in Tiller.
Pay off more of my student loans. If I stick to my spending budget, I can put more toward paying down my student loans. I have a goal of how much from each paycheck to pay into my loans, and I will assess each pay period how well I’m doing to stick to that.
Be better about updating my Tiller transactions and categories to track spending. I have a really detailed spreadsheet from Tiller that I love and have put a lot of work into personalizing, but I don’t do a good job of staying on top of categorizing transactions and looking at trends. I want to make a point of organizing my transactions every week, on Sundays as part of a morning ritual - coffee, breakfast, Tiller organization.
Limit my ability to easily spend money by building in physical roadblocks/habits that force me to not spend money. An example of this would be to remove all tap pay/wallet apps from phone.
Another would be to shame yourself every time you spend money by enabling transactional email notifications from your bank to yourself so that you have to face each transaction in your inbox.
I tapped into my rainy day savings funds this year to make some renovations and due to unexpected health care bills. My goal is to build those back up close to or exceed my high water mark of 2019. I will have to maintain a positive cash flow despite another reduction in income due leaning deeper into semi-retirement towards full retirement.
I have used Tiller for two years now to help me understand better where my money is heading.
Going into 2020, I will continue to do so and begin the process of re-directing extra funds towards paying off my credit card. That should be done by the end of January. After that, my goal is to pay down my car loan by $5,000 over the course of the year.
The biggest goal for my family is to buy a house early next year. We’ve been saving for years, found the perfect place to live, and are just waiting for the right house to pop up (of course for the right price). I’m continually reminded how blessed we are to be in this position. I think a lot of times we can get caught up in always reaching for the next goal, and forget to spend time reflecting on how far we’ve come already. I’m so proud of where my wife and I have come financially, even if we’re still many years away from our early-ish retirement goals.
I like the other goal of categorizing transactions every Sunday. I let that habit slip earlier this year so I’d love to pick it back up in 2020.
My 2019 goal is to get more specific with my categories and develop budgets with more rigor so I can get really clear on my spending habits and figure out how to be sure I’m putting at least $500 into my savings account every month.
My 2020 will include getting married, which is a great thing! But it also means bringing on my fiances student loan debt in addition to mine. While I’ve been tracking and increasing my net worth the last 2.5 years since I graduated college, it will go back down to almost zero when we get married : (
No worries though! I still want to anticipate that dip in our combined net worth by saving 25-30% of my income in 2020 and also I plan to max out my HSA account this year as well as my Roth IRA. I want to start out our new life together on a strong financial footing (no matter what that net worth number says!)
Contrary to most, my financial goal for 2020 is to spend more on things that add some value or spontenuity to my life.
Over the past few years I’ve got my finances in order and understood; set aside recurring payments to savings, pension and dozens of ‘pots’ for planned outgoings (£20 a month for a new phone in 2 years, £30 a month for my insurance this year, etc)
One thing I’m not great at, is spending this money when it comes to it. I want to get better at not worrying when I spend £60 on a meal out now and again, or treat myself to a shirt once in a while. If I’ve budgeted for it and can afford, I want to get more comfortable with purchases that make me happy.
After using Tiller for the ENTIRE year and diligently categorizing every transaction, my goal is to really figure out my cash flow. I especially want to track down if I’ve been using the spreadsheet correctly and whether the numbers it gives me as answers have any relationship to the question I’m asking!!
My 2020 goal is to get my big picture goals in place and get the details as fully automated as possible. That way, I will better understand how my money decisions fit into the big picture goals and don’t feel stressed about the little things! A cheap cup of coffee in a really cool Tiller mug would really help me to meet this goal.
My goal is to increase my giving by 1% and increase my savings by 10%. Currently we are giving a decent percentage of our income to non-profits we believe in and I’d like to also begin increasing my retirement and non-retirement savings for 2020.
