My 2023 Financial Goals

I’ve been writing about my fitness and wellness goals a fair bit over the past couple of weeks, so I thought I’d share my financial goals too. I want to break the stigma of talking about money among friends, and show what a regular person who isn’t making hundreds of thousands a year telling you what to do and what to buy. I also just listened to Financial Feminist’s podcast episode about financial goal setting for the new year and it motivated me even more, but also had some great advice, you can listen here or on your favorite podcast app. She didn’t pay me to say that, she’s just awesome.

Goal 1: Pay off all my debt

Right now I have a pretty significant amount of credit card debt. No emergencies, no extenuating circumstances. Just poor choices and one maxed-out credit card. I know. I don’t know what I was thinking either. What’s done is done, I can’t change the past, so I’m just planning on moving forward and making sure I don’t do it again. Currently, every time I make any side income, that money is going straight to the debt. I’m also cutting my spending to bare bones, so I’ll be living very leanly for the next few months.

Goal 2: Spend 15 minutes every weekday/1 hour every weekend day on side income streams

This pretty directly ties into goal 1 for obvious reasons haha. I usually come home and think oh I’m too tired, oh I don’t feel like it, whatever bullshit excuse I have that day. It’s 15 minutes. I can suffer through for 15 minutes (at least) if it earns me some extra cash. And two hours on the weekend is no big deal, I have no business going out till my debt is paid off anyway, plus that’s extra money in my pocket/savings/investment account once I get this debt off my back.

Goal 3: Track all income and expenses for 3 months, then establish a budget based on that data.

I have a confession to make. I have no idea where my money goes (kind of). Obviously, I know it goes to rent, electric bills, my random crap that I buy. But I don’t know exactly where each dollar goes. So I’m going to change that. I found a budget template, courtesy of r/personalfinance on Reddit, I have plans every Sunday to set half an hour aside to log every single one of my expenses and my income, and just seeing what happens. Once I have that base of information, I’m going to set a spartan budget so I can aggressively pay down my credit card debt.

Goal 4: Stick to that budget for the 9 months (rest of the year)

See what I did here? Once I have that spartan budget I’m sticking to it for the rest of year so I can get rid of this debt once and for all. It's……a lot of money. An embarrassing amount of money. So it's definitely going to take me at least a year to pay it all off. So I'm going to be on my budget like stripes on a tiger. But I'm going to put my head down, stay the course and come out the other side less stressed with a system to earn extra income already in place so I can pursue my other goals like investing, saving more, and building up my retirement accounts.

Those are my goals for this year, and how I'm going to achieve them! It's obviously not as planned out as the fitness ones because my side hustles aren't the most consistent (more on that soon) but I'm of the mindset is a dollar is a dollar, each one gets me one step closer to being debt free.

Let me know what your financial goals are for this year, or if you have any questions or want any additional resources for personal finance advice!