2017 Goals

Hello 2017! Happy New Year everyone ? I always like the start of a new year; full of hope and optimism for the year ahead. The unknown of what’s in store for everyone in the next twelve months, plus lots of new experiences to enjoy and memories to treasure forever. We will be going on another family holiday, spending time together, and watching Frugal Baby grow and experience the world. He’ll be able to talk soon! How exciting 🙂

 

Each year I like to set myself goals that I hope to achieve by the end of the year; to keep me on track and to challenge myself throughout the year. I also feel like it makes me more accountable over the year; 12 months is a long time and focus can drift at times, so knowing I have yearly goals to reach as well as monthly ones make me more focused. Again, like with the monthly ones, I do a financial section and a personal section. I also have some blogging goals, as I want to grow my blog/business over the next year.

 

My Financial Goals for 2017 are:

– Put £12,000 into savings

– Overpay our mortgage by £300

– Have 220 NSDs throughout the year

– Earn £3,000 in side income

– Receive £300 in dividend payments.

 

The savings goal is self-explanatory; to continue our journey towards early retirement, I need to save as much as possible. Ideally it would be more than this, but I would be very pleased if I manage this by the end of the year. I have done the sums, and it is possible! Just 😉

 

Although being mortgage free ties in with our early retirement goals, it has taken a backseat now, especially since we’re now in the five figures bracket. Our focus is more on saving and investing, and getting the ball rolling on that aspect of our long term plans a lot more. £300 equates to £25 a month which is ridiculously small but still means our mortgage is going down in the right direction.

 

As I have somehow managed to lose the ability to gain multiple NSDs during the week, I have reduced my 2017 target by 10. I want to meet this, desperately. I am such a fan of No Spend Days to make you budget properly, so I’m slightly frustrated at myself for not managing them lately. Watch this space, I will get my groove back!

 

Something that I started with relatively late into 2015 was side income. Through 2016 I steadily built on earning side income, though I came in far from my goal. Therefore, I have kept the target amount the same for 2017. £3,000 over the year equates to £250 which seems quite a daunting task at the moment, but I have lots of plans in the pipeline. To bring in an additional £3,000 before taxes would be amazing and helpful to our plans.

 

Finally, something that I am so excited about, is building my dividend income. I only started this properly in 2016, so I am looking forward to seeing where this goes in 2017. Building passive income is such a priority, plus reading other blogger’s successes with dividend income is really inspiring.

 

My Personal goals for 2017 are:

 

– Start a capsule wardrobe

– Decorate our bedroom

– Be more kind to myself

– Stop worrying about things I can’t change and focus on the ones I can.

  

I am leaning more and more towards a more minimalistic lifestyle; although I can appreciate some things, owning lots and lots for no particular reason is beginning to jar a bit for me. At some point, I want to go through all of the clothes I own and either sell/donate most of them. I want to create a smaller wardrobe, of perhaps slightly more expensive clothes, that will last. I plan to document my journey on this, in the hopes it’ll help others too.

 

We are rubbish at decorating, purely because we don’t have the skills! However, I really want to get our bedroom decorated to give it a new lease of life. It just needs the wallpaper stripped, lining paper put up, painted and a new carpet. Simple! Hopefully it won’t be too expensive either 🙂

 

The last two are the same as last year, as I am still working on not being so self critical and more accepting of myself. This was working well last year, and I want to continue.

 

My business goals for 2017 are:

– Officially launch Frugal Cottage Coaching

– Begin second project (revealed later on…)

– Grow my Twitter followers to 3,000

– Grow my Facebook likes to 500

– Grow my Instagram followers to 800

– Grow my Pinterest followers to 1,000

– Earn between £300 – £500 a month online by the end of the year

 

I really want to build on my social media presence in 2017, as some of the people I follow have huge amounts of followers on their various accounts. I need to come up with a concrete social media strategy that allows me to connect with more people with a similar mindset, and to help people with their financial journey. If you have any of these accounts and don’t follow me on there, I’d be extremely grateful if you could! I need to do more reading around this; I really struggle to know what to post on any of them, so I need to figure it out! I think I’m going to focus on Instagram and Pinterest this year, as my main focus. Facebook is really slow for me, and Twitter seems to be growing slowly but surely.

 

Finally, and this links in to my financial goals for the year, I want to be making at least £300 a month online by the end of the year. I hope this will be a mix of blogging revenue, coaching, dividend income and anything else in between! I’d love to do some public speaking, but have no idea where to start with that. Plus, that would be incredibly daunting!

 

Anyway, here’s to 2017 – I have a feeling it’s going to be great! Thank you for sticking around, reading my posts, commenting and generally making me feel like I’m doing the right thing. I am so grateful for each and every one of my lovely readers.

 

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