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)
