My 2020 goals:
- Set up our finances to weather my partner’s job loss until she lands a new job
- Rebuild our savings after # 1
- Get back on track with our mortgage payoff strategy after # 2
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My financial goal for 2020 is to invest and save 60% of our household income (ultimately to retire early). I have been increasing it with the ultimate goal to retire early.
Tiller has helped me tremendously in getting transactions categorized quickly. I used to dread doing it in Mint and often would procrastinate, but with Tiller, it is so fast and easy, I am able to keep on top of the budget in real time, instead of a month in retrospect.
Here are my 2020 financial goals:
Stay on top of monthly budgeting and forecasting
Be mindful of how and where I spend my dollars
Start diversifying my investments and saving more
I love Tiller because I know I have the tools to achieve my financial goals right at my fingertips!
My 2019 goal:
- Get to Net Worth $0
My 2020 goals:
- Get to Net Worth $10k
2 ) Spend less on eating out
3 ) Pay off 1/3 of auto loan
This year I started at -$16k net worth and have been working my way up to $0. Feels nice to see the graph line go from blue on top to blue on bottom.
Thanks for the wonderful motivation Tiller!
Good luck! Having that safety net in savings takes a lot of worry off of you
I’ve been using tiller to track my spending in 2019. My main goal is to reduce my obsurdly large spending category of “Misc”
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My biggest goal is to identify saving opportunities to help facilitate some large projects we’d like to complete in the next year including new floors!
Started using Tiller in late August and for the first time I feel like I finally understand where all my money is going.
My goals for 2020 are:
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Stay focused on paying down credit card debt using avalanche method First credit card was just paid off this month. Pay off two more in 2020.
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End the year by having paid off the final auto loan for our family.
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Increase the amount of our emergency savings.
My goal for 2020 is to split my “fun” budget into experiences and material items (i.e. buying a ticket to a football game would be an experience and buying new jersey would be a material item). Once I have a grasp on this breakdown, I would like to focus on shifting my spend away from material things that usually don’t add any value to my life
We started using Tiller after getting married - I was used to manually inputting all my expenses into a spreadsheet, and my husband never really had a budget. Lots of adjusting and recalibrating over the past several months, but now we’re settled into combined finances enough to have clear goals and strategies to meet them!
Main goal for 2020 is to consistently save $1,000 a month so we can knock out our emergency fund goal in early 2021 and start saving for a home down payment.
Mine are fairly simple.
- Pay off mortgage by the end of 2020. Our only debt is a small mortgage (but with high interest rate) and very large student loans. Paying off the mortgage will go a long way to getting a handle on the more daunting student loans. The mortgage amount may be small, but paying it all off will require quite a bit of active money management in order to pull off in only a year.
- Determine our true net worth. I’ve tried many different systems (spreadsheets and your semi-competitors) and I never found one where I could track EVERYTHING before - manual and automated, static and dynamic - without a lot of work. So I only have a figure in the general ballpark. I’m fairly confident I can use Tiller to track everything like I’ve always wanted to do and get a very clear picture of where we’re at. That’s my goal for Q1.
I want to spend less on eating out. My wife’s an amazing cook, and we often look at each other at our dinner table and say, “…and why are we eating out?” Awesome.
Happy Holidays, everyone. Thank you so much for sharing the ideas, it’s good to read about how we’re all setting into motion a strategy to meet our short/long term goals. What fun it would be to have this thread become a “throw back 2020 post” when this is brought up again (?) as a topic in December 2020 to see how we all did?
My goals this year are to just trust the plan that we have in place, which is:
-Continue saving at least 15% of our income for retirement (automatically deducted from pay, no choice!). Trust that we’re doing the right thing by investing instead of paying off our HELOC for home improvements which is hovering around $12K right now (making minimal payments to it since we net earn more money by investing than paying off the debt).
-Help with meal planning in a way that minimizes food waste (that can add up $$). It’s always so disheartening to open the fridge at random times during the week and in the process of looking for that ingredient or container of _____, come across 4 or 5 things that need to be tossed because they’re becoming goop! Yuck, and what a waste of resources!
-Make at least $3500K in contributions (total) to our 2 kids’ college funds.
Good luck, everyone!
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Well the plan is to pay more money towards higher interest student loan debt to eliminate some of it this year. I have to stick more to our budget and actually record our expenses. Then I can see how much extra cash I have to stick to the outstanding debt!
My financial goals for 2020 are:
- Fully fund my Roth IRA and 401k
- Save 50% of my income
- Create a form of passive income that will earn me money year after year without putting more money into it (put time into it instead)
- Build up a 6-month emergency fund
I have two goals - (1) win a Mug! and (2) i am getting married in 2020, so want to be able to use tiller to bring on my fiancé’s finances to plan for the future, which would include moving, buying a house, and starting planning for our family’s future. We both use tiller, but would like to use it to continue to see where we are spending our money and how we can save more, as well as plan for what our spending is going to look like in the future.
Get more aggressive with my investment strategy.
I have quite a bit of cash in an online savings account. Every month the interest rate drops. Because I have a very accurate picture of my finances using the Zero Sum Budgeting sheet in Tiller, I have identified money that I don’t absolutely need in the near term. I can put that money in investment products that are slightly less conservative.
- I would like to pay off a car loan - have about $6500 left on that.
- Reduce my grocery bill to less than $1000 - I do buy organic and from whole food and health food conscious stores - so that is challenging some - but I want to try and bring that down. Have just 1 kid at home now instead of 3, so that should be feasible. Even would like to get smarter and do more like $800.
- Review subscriptions - maybe remove 1 or 2?
- Pay off new computer I bought - but really needed - $3000 apple barclay card no interest loan I want to pay off.
- Save for holidays better so not charging like always.
- Start saving more for my 14 year old for college - just have not been able to do that. Other 2 kids in college now - one on ROTC - smart kid! - other will be getting loans her 3rd or 4th year because we simply don’t have enough to pay for her out of state.
- My BIG financial goal is to downsize - not even own a home and mortgage pit type of investment and simplify. But spouse not in agreement yet. I want a simple life without all the bills and headaches that come with home ownership, etc.
This year I got a ton better about paying off credit card as I charged so I was not paying interest, but building points. We have multiple credit cards to build up miles - with 2 kids away at college and visits home - it adds up.
Financial Goals for 2020:
- Savings rate of 30+%
- Purchase spouse new car (no debt)
- Spend less than $800/month on groceries and restaurants