March (Greenfingered) Goals Update
Yes. Believe it or not it’s a composter!
Hi guys! After a pretty manic March which culminated in a stag do to Berlin (yes I made it back alive!) it’s time to weigh up if I found any time to hit any of my goals. For brevity I will only comment on goals that I’ve either made progress on or think I should have made progress on but haven’t. If you want to read the full list of goals you can do so here.
I’m going to use a Win/Lose/Draw to denotation how well I think I’ve done on each goal, should be fairly self explanatory!
Let’s get stuck straight in shall we?
Financial Goals
- Set up a bank account for my new company (ASAP) – No progress at all! There was a Natwest next to my work which I was going to use to go in and do this one lunchtime but I’ve procrastinated so long on it they’ve actually closed the branch :)! So now I’ll have to find time on a Saturday morning and drag myself into town 🙁 Lose!
- Learn about and submit a tax form (April) – Not done this yet as it’s only just gone into the next tax year, this one I’ll be looking to tick off this month! Draw!
- Increase Net Worth by £20K or ~30% by end of year bonus paycheck (July/August) – This has gone up 12% since last month according to my March financial update but this is mainly because I am estimating some things and also my method of calculating it has not been consistent. Also I didn’t really give a start dat on this one, was it from January or from when I wrote the Goals post?! I will get a post out asap to clear up how I will calculate this going forward and exactly what this goal entails. This is now a short term goal so if I haven’t done it by the next goal update… unleash hell. Draw!
- Achieve overall savings rate of 60% (First Half) – With a savings rate of 43% last month I could call this a fail but it’s really early days, and with my bonus due in July I am expecting this to make up a lot any shortfall. If we can hit around 50% up to then, we should hit 60% in total! Draw!
Home/Garden Goals
- Make my own composter (Imminent!) – Done! See picture at the top of the post! I’ll write up a post on exactly what I did asap! Win!
- Garden spruce up (March/April) – Design and create new garden layout – Remove stones and put down small lawn, build up flower beds and create vegetable patch(es). Half done! We have done a lot of work and also managed to bag a decent garden furniture set for £100 off eBay and have been cleaning and treating that to get it looking good again. Win!
Physical Goals
- Running goals – According to my running App I’ve done one run this month so I think we can safely call this one a huge… Lose!
- Improve general body strength – Do at least 2 x 10 minute Sworkit App body strength work outs per week – I did 5 workouts which is pretty lame, but with all the gardening which is far more of a workout, I think I’ll call this one a Draw!
- Get my golf handicap down to 20 – Played a few times, one good round and 2 bad ones! Handicap hasn’t budged though but I can feel a low one coming soon. Draw!
- “Get better at squash” – Hard to quantify but I played three times and won twice, so I guess that’s pretty good. Win!
Blogging Goals
- Write on average 2 posts a week for the whole of 2015 – I made 5 posts in March, I have got quite a few in draft to post in April so I am hoping to catch up on the average this month!
Productivity Goals
I have acquired a new shiny notebook from work and am using this for my TODO list. It’s working ok so far and I definitely feel more productive and am just getting on with doing the things on the list rather than just having them loosely floating around in the back of my head, causing me unnecessary stress. So we’ll call this one a… Win!
Overall a mixed bag of wins, draws and losses, but I’m very happy with progress so far considering I felt like time was short. April looks to be a bit less manic so I’m hoping to tick off the rest of the garden goal, and get back into the blogging.
How was your March in terms of goals!?
Finally here is some more visual proof we are working hard on the garden goals 🙂
Building up flower beds with old sleepers
Pebbles! Everywhere! The bane of our lives!
Starting to make a dent into the pebbles…
About half way through… Chaos!
Looking much better… still work to be done in April though!
Discussion (11) ¬
Great work on the garden. I see it is coming along nicely. The ebbs and flows of the savings goal have been getting me lately. I will see with my moneystepper’s challenge results for this month how much catching up I still need to do.
Thanks Lynx!
We’ve stripped most of it down now just need to rebuild it back up and make it look pretty 🙂
I’m with you on that one… It’s best to take a long term view on so don’t beat yourself up if you have one or two bad months! Just need to be realistic on whether you can catch up later on.
Cheers!
to be honest mate, I saw the top photo and thought ‘WTF is that?’ Now I can understand it might be a composter… but why not FIRE it into rocket powered goodness by sticking a load of worms in it? Red wigglers are the best, and they will eat through your compost in no time.
We are on track/ahead of 75% of our goals judging by The 4th one will be killed next week when I get paid!
Cheers
Haha… It don’t look pretty but it does the job (well hopefully).
I meant to ask actually and possibly a stupid question, what do red wigglers look like!? I found a load of red looking worms underneath the pebbles I was digging up so chucked them in there. I may buy some though as I’m not sure if there was really enough to make a difference!
Cheers!
Some good DIY/gardening skills going on there. March certainly looked hectic for you! Not sure about you, but stag dos take me about a week to get over.
40%+ is still way more than most people save, right!
March was alright for me, catching up on my cycling goal which is the furthest behind at the moment. Still Hoarding my wage like a good FI seeker 😀
Mr Z
Hi Mr Z!
I still felt horrendous the whole week after. I am kinda glad that stag do season is well and truly over for me as most of my friends are now married (or likely will never be married… haha!).
Yea it was a weird month. I won’t be able to pull the SIPP trick again for a while but then again I won’t have high expenses like that for a while either so I guess we can call that one a draw and move on.
Good work mate… keep it up!