theFIREstarter

Goal 1: Lay on floor (tick)

Goal 2: Get belly rubbed (tick!)

Onto 2016….!

Well, it’s February already and I’m still reviewing last year! I set myself a hefty lot of goals last year, maybe too many but I find it hard to not get excited and, well, I like making lists 🙂

I’ll be using my standard Win / Draw / Lose notation to describe how I think I did.

Let’s see how I got on then shall we?

Financial Goals

• Set up a bank account for my new company – I did this but I cheated a bit and just set up a personal account to use for business purposes. There are draw backs to doing this though but if you are interested in the how and why then read my post on it here. Win!
• Learn about and submit a tax form – This was in part to learn about how to sign up for and submit a self assessment tax form, and partly to claim back some SIPP higher rate tax. I did it, so it’s a Win!
• Increase Net Worth by £20K or ~30% by end of bonus paycheque – I broke the net worth and savings rate goals down into two sections of the year as I was due to go part time in about July originally, and then slowly ramp that down to end up essentially unemployed hopefully self-employed by the end of the year. However this changed slightly (in my favour I think) to just going part time which started around September. This also affected some of the other goals below (in terms of having less time to do them) but I will try not to harp on about it much more than this once, I think you probably get this gist of it by now! Anyway by July we were short of the 20K net worth increase by £4, so I hope you’ll excuse me if I call that one a Win! (Although I am ruing those couple of bacon sarnies I bought for breakfast on the way to work in June! Damnit!)
• Achieve overall savings rate of 60% – I can’t be bothered to go back and work this one out but we definitely did not hit it so let’s just call it a Lose! and move on 🙂
• Increase Net Worth by anything positive – Due to reasons stated above this was a bit of a pointless goal, but we obviously did it, so it’s a Win!
• Achieve savings rate of > 0% – Ditto to the above and another Win!

Business Goals

Most of these are pointless as I just didn’t have the time I thought I would have as already discussed but let’s go through them anyway (very quickly!)

• Build one website that is making regular income – Didn’t even start on any side projects. Lose!
• Build a further 2 of my other website ideas– Same as above, Lose!
• Build one Android App – I actually did this! I build an app for an old work colleague. It’s pretty simple but he was quite happy with it and is going to pay me when it hits the app stores which should be any time over the next few weeks once I iron out a few final bugs. Win!
• Build one iPhone App – Same as above, I built both Android and iOS apps. Win!
• Secure 2 short term casual freelance projects through contacts – No time, wasn’t needed, etc… Lose!
• Offer my services (for free) to a charity for at least 5 days or on a short term project – Unfortunately no time for this. I will keep this in mind for future years though for sure. Lose!
• Join professional freelance websites and update CV/portfolio – Wasn’t even remotely needed, but let’s stick to the rules and declare it a Lose!

Home/Garden Goals

• Bathroom refit (July/August) – Hilariously late on the delivery (in keeping with pretty much every other construction project that humans have ever planned!) but I didn’t even start it until November. Here are some pics (and here) of the first lot of progress if you missed it, and I’ll do a final post once a few final loose ends have been tied up. I’m 95% there so going to call this one a big juicy fat WINNNNN!!!!!! 🙂
• Garden spruce up – We did everything we wanted to in the garden this year so it’s a Win!
• Make my own bike shed – I didn’t do this, and we didn’t even buy any bikes (hah!) so didn’t really have the motivation if I’m honest. Anyway it’s a Lose!
• Make my own composter – I did have a crack at this and it turned out, “OK”, but have subsequently replaced it with a big plastic one which I saved from going to the dump. Anyway it was a Win!
• Kitchen frugal refurb – I didn’t get time to do this! I am actually starting this project in about 2 weeks time, but in terms of last years goals it is a Lose!

TFS Challenges

I came up with four challenge ideas last year but never got round to implementing any of them! D’oh! Here they are just for completeness’ sake. I’m really gutted about the sleep one, I’m so rubbish at getting enough sleep and with a baby on the way I can’t see that situation getting better any time soon 😀

• £25 per Week Food Bill Challenge – Lose!
• Sleep challenge – Lose!
• No Meat Challenge – Lose!
• Switch It Off Challenge – Lose!

Physical Goals

• Run 1 mile under 6 minutes – I did this at some point in May, I did it in 5:27. Nay bad for a wee lad! Win!
• Run 2 miles in under 13 minutes – I did 2 miles in 12:51 back in May as well. Win!
• Run 5K (3.1 miles) in under 20 minutes – A bit of a shock, a scandal, stop the bloody press moment here! I actually declared this one a win back in May as well but looking back at it, that was only for 3 miles. Looking back at my running app I seem to have a bit of a blocker getting that extra 0.1 mile in under the 20 minutes!!! To do 3.1 miles in 20 minutes you need to run a 6:27 pace and the nearest I got to that was in October where I ran 3.03 miles in 19:39 which works out at a 6:29 pace. Why I didn’t carry on and try to do the other 0.07 miles in the final 20 seconds I have no idea… 😀 Anyway it looks like this one is actually a Lose!
• Run a 1:30 Half Marathon – I did this in September in the Reigate half marathon, upon which I decided to set myself some even tougher running goals (which I have to admit I am now slightly regretting with only 3 weeks to the first one!). Win!
• Improve general body strength – I totally bombed out and gave up on this one. I find my body needs to rest in between serious work outs and as I have been running more this year and doing other bits like squash this was the first thing to slip as my heart was never really in it. Lose!
• Get my golf handicap down to 20 – Managed to get back down to 20 but in all honesty I never played enough to get any serious improvement. I still think I can get down to 20 this year but probably won’t set that as a goal as I’ll just be playing as and when I can. It’s supposed to be fun after all eh! Lose!
• “Get better at squash” – A very vague goal and I will admit a pretty pointless one. I won some squash games and I lost some. Overall I would say about a 50% win rate against my work playing partner, about the same as always. I would like to imagine we have both upped our game over the year which has just cancelled each other out though. I’ll call it a Draw!
• Average 20 weeks alcohol per week or less – Haha! I think we all know the result of this one. I had 3 months where the average was under this target (Jan, Feb, Nov) with October pretty much bang on at 20.06, but the rest were over. Lose!

Blogging Goals

• Write on average 2 posts a week for the whole of 2015  – I managed to average about 1 and a half blog posts per week for the whole of 2015. It’s a technical loss but I am actually pretty happy with the outcome! Lose!

Relationship Goals

I stated:

One “measurable” will be to have at least one night in the week where we are both at home together, and we can chat, sit down together for dinner and even watch a movie together if we are both just pooped from work…

Well, I’m not sure we did that. But I feel like we are closer than ever (pass the sick bucket, right!) and more importantly for the purposes of this blog our goals are now more aligned than ever (i.e. spend less + work less = spend more time together (along with baby T of course!).

Productivity Goals

I wanted to do some sort of biweekly goal setting and I kind of limped in and out of this one. I’m not too bothered about it, sometimes you just can’t be bothered or just haven’t got the time to do productive things all the time! I feel like overall this year I’ve had a very productive year balanced with having a lot of fun, so I am going to call this one a Win despite not really having anything to measure against 🙂

And that’s it! I will for certain, not be setting anywhere near as many goals this year, so I will post my 2016 goals pretty soon as it shan’t take me long to write them all down if all goes according to plan!

How was your 2015 for goal setting/hitting? Do you bother with goals or do prefer to play things fast and loose?! Let me know in the comments down there!