The holidays are a great time to share stories with your family. Have you noticed that the best ones seem to come out of nowhere, when you least expect it? Well, my mom definitely had me laughing for a while with two hilarious stories about financial revenge from her life and I can’t stop think about how funnier they are. But they have me thinking…how much money would you pay for sweet revenge?
“Nothing is permanent about our behavior patterns except our belief that they are so” – Moshe Feldenkrais
I was a little shocked, but I was able to find a quote that aligns perfectly with the message of this article. This morning, I felt motivated to write this article because it finally hit me. If you are unhappy with the status quo of your financial situation or are on the fence about trying a new personal finance strategy, why not take risks and go for gold?
Ah.. the candles are burning, the coffee is brewing and the mind is turning. This is typically the time of year when we start thinking, writing down and developing the upcoming year goals and what is needed to be done in order to reach those goals. As we start to write them down, one can literally write anything as their goal, such as, jump three inches higher, have the greenest grass, make the best bologna sandwich, write an article about the best bacon; you get the drift. This article is really to hone in on not just establishing goals and the stones to walk on to get there, but the “why” to your goal, the “purpose” to what you are setting out to accomplish. This is very important and a great time to take time to search for that purpose for what you are setting out to do.
If you haven’t picked up on this yet, after we stated earlier in the year we were not in a hurry to buy a house, my wife and I are beginning to ramp up the process for buying a house. Wow is it a complicated, intense, and fast-moving process. We’ve read articles, listened to countless hours of conversations with family/friends, and co-workers, and fallen asleep too many nights to HGTV in our effort to gather as much information as possible. Buying a house is such a major life decision and we are going to take our time with the decision. We are finalizing on our list of things that are the most important to the two of us and it only seemed fitting to whittle our list down to a five.
December 2016. Almost 6 months after I posted about crushing over the $7,000 mark, I have now jumped over the next rung on the projected dividend income high jump bar. It couldn’t have come at a better time, when weeks are frustrating with traffic pile-ups from snow, working later hours for “the man” and the holiday season upon us. To say I didn’t think I was going to reach this goal would be a lie, I knew I would get here. I just knew it. Luck has quite a bit to do with it, but I had faith and confidence in the actions I was doing, that I would get to the new height. In this post I will share what I did to arch the back over the $8,000 in projected dividend income bar!
Each day I watch the stock market in awe. At 4 PM EST, I read a headline like “Stock Market Sets New Record” and when I log online in the morning I am reading an article about how the market is up in the pre-market once again. By the end of the day, it is like de ja vu and I start the process all over again. This market makes finding stocks the meet our stock screener difficult, how could it not? Well, I have been thinking a lot about where I want to allocate my capital recently and what I want my next move to be. After doing some research on various blogs, including some articles written by my fellow Diplomat, I find myself considering the option that the title of the article outlines. Is now the time to accelerate the payments on my student loans?
It is that time of the year. To me, December means finishing out the year strong, racing towards the finish line, and setting the table for a successful year going forward. For the last few weeks, I have been thinking long and hard about my life, investing, and our blog goals. What should I focus on? Where should I be at this point next year? Questions like these have racing through my mind and I am trying to process and make sense of them all. I’ve been thinking a lot about the goals I have set from the prior year and trying to leverage them as much as possible, including both the successes and the shortcomings. I thought it would be helpful for me, and hopefully some of you, to write down my thoughts and lessons learned over the last few years about setting goals. Time to dive in.
