#39 | 2020 Goals

This week I want to lay out some goals for 2020. I mulled it over all week. My original intention was to follow the same format as my 2019 recap from last week. I would discuss the goals for the blog and the Personal Control Book, then consider the 3 Life Focuses: Financial Independence, Health, and Philanthropy.

The more I thought about this approach, the worse it felt. I couldn't quite place why, but I finally realized I was over-emphasizing Financial Independence. If I boil down the blog and PCB, potential monetizing goals relate to improving my financial independence. These goals would overload Financial Independence and place greater importance on that Life Focus than the other two. Therefore, I stripped them out.

That leaves my original 3 Life Focuses:

• Financial Independence
• Health
• Philanthropy

So here they are:

Financial Independence
From reviewing my On-The-Horizon Beacons, this Life Focus has two aspects. The first is the FI portion of FIRE; the second is having livecations. My 2020 goals will continue traveling towards these Beacons since I'm not looking to reverse direction.

In terms of being FI, my goal is to improve my non-9-5 income stream to expense ratio. This year my wife and I put an increased focus on generating new income streams. I feel we currently have four legit non-9-5 in various forms of reliability and size. These income streams come close to covering our core expenses; mortgage, car expenses, etc. My goal is to have our alternative income fully cover our core expenses in addition to also covering our monthly lifestyle, ex: going out, recurring entertainment. To achieve this, I plan on applying pressure to increase our alternative incomes while also aggressively tackling expenses, especially monthly recurring bills.

To advance our livecations, we're already tentatively planning a month-long summer trip to Bolivia. Unfortunately, there are a lot of hurdles to overcome, with some of them being out of our control. My reach goal is to complete that trip, but my attainable goal would be to get all of our ducks in a row this year so that even if we are unable to have a livecation this year, the road will be ready for next year. This goal involves obtaining passports, ensuring there would be no snags with not only my 9-5 but also in maintaining any of our alternative income streams, determining who will house-sit, and allocating enough capital to fund an extended trip.

Health
For health, I want to stop the yo-yo-ing cycle. I've found that I can typically maintain a particular habit for a couple of months, but then I fall off the wagon. I'll manage a healthy and (supposedly) sustainable eating plan and, in the process, lose a dozen pounds. But then the stress hits and the junk food tempts, and the pounds come back. Or I'll start running again and will get into a nice rhythm, and then the unpredictability of life happens, and I lose my routine and can't start again.

So for this Life Focus, I want to focus on sustainable habits around eating, exercising, and overall weight. To achieve this goal, I'm planning on pacing myself. For example, I've done Weight Watchers in the past and find it a convenient way to track eating. The problem I've had in the past is once I start to get closer to my target weight, my weight loss naturally slows down, which mentally feels like I'm failing even though this is an expected outcome and weight loss wasn't my goal. However, weight is an easily tracked metric, and it's tough to switch from a weight-loss mentality to a weight-maintain mindset. Therefore this time, I'm not going to track my weight at all. Instead, I'll configure Weight Watchers to aim to maintain my weight, put in a guesstimate for how much I weigh today, and then use my Shapa scale to track progress. At that point, my success criteria will be to step on my Shapa daily receiving a green-to-blue Shapa color, and to record my food intake consistently.

That's just an example of a starting point. I intend to add in an exercise element to the goal too, and then once I have an all-encompassing system built around my current level of health, I can execute minor tweaks to the system to achieve any small gains I might have.

Philanthropy
I feel like I struggled the most with this Life Focus, which has lead to struggling to lay out a solid goal for 2020. This Life Focus also has probably the longest and most ambitious On-The-Horizon Beacon. Therefore, I will keep my 2020 focus simple and easy to help jump-start progress.

In 2020, I want to find one or more non-profit organizations that I can volunteer at semi-regularly throughout the year. The organization and its mission and who or what it serves will not matter. How frequently I volunteer does not matter. My only goal is to find an organization that I feel I could volunteer at for years to come.

(Written 2019.01.05)

#38 | 2019 Recap

On January 3rd, 2019, I posted my first Boredom is my Goal blog entry. This post will go out on January 2nd, 2020. I felt it was a good time to do a recap of how far things have come. In terms of the blog growth, the Personal Control Book progression, and the progress of my three core Life Focuses on Financial Independence, Health, and Philanthropy.

First up, there is my Boredom is my Goal blog. My content creation was strong. I was able to post a new entry every Thursday of the year, minus a 3-month hiatus when life got too busy. I would have preferred not to have that break, but I'm happy with that outcome nonetheless. In terms of readership, that had some highlights but has been somewhat lackluster. One entry received several hundred views; a few reached a couple of dozen views. One thing I find interesting is that before the hiatus, I had consistent views on each post. After the pause, it's been crickets. That's a bit discouraging, but it feels like it's indicating that content and consistency are kings, even though my takeaway from when I stopped writing is that I should be more comfortable on myself when it came to expectations of having a release schedule. The conflict!

Next up is the development of the Personal Control Book. The progress of the PCB is my surprise story of the year. Creating a PCB wasn't on my radar at all. Still, I ended up completely revamping a system I developed to manage the projects of dozens of engineers and technology professionals and tweaked things for personal use. After many iterations and experimenting on tools, layouts, and structures, I feel like I have boiled things down to something that works, at least for me. I've found that it's provided a lot of focus in my life and has helped me to channel my energies. I also worked with three individuals in setting up their PCBs, two of which finished the exercise, with one of them providing semi-frequent updates on how their progression.

For my life focuses, this is where I felt like I had the most significant wins but also the biggest let downs. Let's start with the least positive and move towards the most exciting.

First up is Philanthropy. By the end of the year, I was hoping to have a quarterly-recurring self-organized donation drive started. I made the first donation but never initiated the second. I felt like the initial round had a ton of lessons learned on how I could have done things better. I was somewhat excited to improve on things, but I tied the donations to having enough cashflow from side projects. Unfortunately, cashflow became tight, so the motivation to donate became minimal. I wasn't interested in external fundraising sources, so that fizzled out. In addition to the donation drive, I also started the year out volunteering monthly at a local food drive. That was going well, but I noticed a disenchanting trend with the other volunteers, so I felt it was best to move on and haven't found an alternative yet.

Overall, I was able to apply more focus on Philanthropy in 2019 than in other recent years, but it felt like excuses were abundant, let downs were frequent, and I didn't achieve as much as I wanted. But it's a good foundation for me to build on in 2020.

Health had a bit more consistent success. I put a lot of attention to diet and healthy lifestyle changes. As a result, my typical consumption averages more on the healthy side with a more substantial assortment of fruits, vegetables, and overall diversity of color on my plate. This lifestyle focus laid the groundwork for managing my weight. I followed some meal plans and purchased a Shapa scale. Exercising was a bit under-performing, but there were hints of launching a consistent workout plan. These things take time, and I'm confident I'll build in a good routine. In terms of relationships, I put a heavy focus on building stability and closeness with each member of the family, and I'm continually re-evaluating where I can do better to see continuous improvements. There have been speedbumps throughout the year. I've found this to be the hardest thing to maintain. Relationships are incredibly dynamic and have to adjust based on the growth of all sides.

A healthy lifestyle seems like it should always be the very top priority, but I love to eat, and laziness always strikes hard, so at the first sign of increased stress and decreased time, a healthy lifestyle tends to suffer first. I was going strong this year until the holiday season started, and a lot of my good habits began to crumble. The good news is that every holiday season is always a struggle to maintain a healthy lifestyle, and the New Year is still a very motivating time to jump back on that bandwagon.

The last focus, Financial Independence, has seen the most progress. I started the year out with a focus on organizing and streamlining my stock market investments. Dealing with financial institutes is a massive pain in the ass. Notaries, mailing in forms, waiting months for some activity, then repeat. But together, my wife and I were able to consolidate and automate this portion of our portfolio. For non-market investments, this year's most substantial investment was a commercial real estate project that we had been discussing for years. This investment adds nicely to our real estate portfolio. We've also started a standalone side hustle of online selling, We're about four months in, but the growth in sales has been very encouraging.

But Financial Independence is not all work and no fun. My main goal for being FI is not to retire early but to be able to have the financial security to spend as much time with my family as possible, especially in the summers when everyone is off from school. During the school year, I've been able to make myself extremely available, attending as many events, and picking up any responsibilities around all three of the kids' schedules. For the summer, I've started the family on the path of getting passports, and I've started all the discussions and planning required to make our (hopefully) first month-long family trip to South America.

At the end of the year, I've done the groundwork for full investing automation. I've run the numbers, and I could consider myself Barista FIREd. I'm ready to start embarking on some extended livecations.

At the end of 2019, I feel like I can look back and feel a sense of accomplishment. My renewed focus is working, and the majority of my life indicators are trending in the desired direction. I'm excited to see what 2020 has in store for myself and my family.

(Written 2019.12.28)