A new year means another set of goals and resolutions.
Since 2019, I have been setting goals and resolutions at the beginning of the year and tracking them via a spreadsheet. I then provide quarterly updates on this blog to share my progress and keep myself accountable.
As Kurtis Pykes pointed out in his recent article, goal setting is not how you achieve the things you want in life. Rather, we need to build systems, processes, objectives, and structures.
It was quite refreshing reading Kurtis’ article and I believe, after four years, I have developed a system to help me accomplish my goals. A lot of that has to do with tracking goals and resolutions in my spreadsheet. 🙂
2023 Goals & Resolutions
Having turned 40 last year, my intention for 2023 is to improve my overall fitness and well-being.
As you can see, many of my goals are yearly long goals, so having structures will be vital in accomplishing these goals.
Financial Goals
Since this blog is a personal finance blog, I feel that it’s important for me to share my financial goals.
Dividend Income over $49,000:
Last year we received $42,305.81 in dividends, which corresponds to a working hourly wage of $20.34 per hour. When I did our dividend income projection at the beginning of 2022, I projected that we’d end up the year with $36,000. Clearly, my projection was completely off the mark.
So this year, I decided to re-do my dividend income projection and be more pragmatic about it. After running a few different scenarios and being realistic, we ended up with a dividend income projection of $49,000 for 2023.
This increase means a 15.82% YoY growth from 2022. Can we do it? We sure hope so!
Grow cash wedge/LTSS to $25,000
We are aiming to be financially independent by 2025. To do so, we estimate that we need a dividend income between $50,000 to $60,000 to sustain our living expenses. As we get closer to 2025, I’d like to grow our cash wedge in our Long Term Savings for Spending (LTSS) account.
Although we’re building our dividend income to ensure it will grow every year and keep up with inflation and our spending, there’s no guarantee that companies will continue to grow dividend payouts. It is also possible for companies to cut dividend payouts when they have a bad year. Therefore, having a cash wedge would provide us with some margin of safety when we’re living off dividends.
A cash wedge of $25,000 is probably not sufficient when we’re living off dividends. But it’s something to build upon starting this year.
Reduce # of stock holdings to 45
We currently hold 49 individual dividend stocks and 1 index ETF. I’d be the first one to admit holding 49 individual dividend stocks is too many. So I’d like to reduce the number of stock holdings to 45 by the end of December.
It doesn’t mean we will be closing out positions for the sake of completing this goal. We want to be smart about closing out positions.
Blog Goals
Continue publishing a blog post every Monday
Originally I was setting very ambitious blog goals for myself, things like growing pageview by 20%, growing blog income by 20%, and enrolling in Ahrefs standard plan for at least a month.
After some self-reflection, I realized these goals don’t align with what this blog is about – I started this blog to share our FI journey and the lessons we are learning along the way. I didn’t start this blog to make money in the first place, so why focus on making more income? Growing pageview by 20% would be nice but that’s really outside of my control. Furthermore, growing blog traffic means focusing more on SEO keywords. I find SEO articles boring to write so I don’t like writing them all that much.
Therefore, I decided to focus on things I can control – writing and publishing articles consistently.
Personal Goals
As mentioned, the focus for this year is fitness and personal well-being. With that in mind, here are my personal goals.
Work out at least twice each week
This is the same goal since 2019 and it has worked quite well for me. I really enjoy doing workouts in our garage with kettlebells.
For this year I plan to continue working out at least twice a week and utilize the heavier (27 kg/60 lbs) kettlebell more.
Read for 10 minutes before bedtime
Last year I read 27 books, a personal best in recent years. Not setting a specific number of books I have to read for the year was a very different approach. It removed the pressure and allowed me to focus on the thing that mattered the most – reading.
This year I will reuse this goal and read for 10 minutes or more before bedtime.
Reduce Body fat to 15%
Because I didn’t do all that well with this goal last year, I’d like to make another attempt.
At the beginning of the year, I was at around 17.5% body fat. To drop 2.5% body fat I really need to focus on my eating – eat nutritious food and stop snacking on salty and sugary snacks throughout the day (or at least minimize it as much as possible). Calory deficit will a key for me in 2023.
Complete a 30-day 100 push-up challenge
J$ started a 30-day 100 push-up challenge last November but I didn’t join the challenge. I have never been super good at push-ups so I’d like to challenge myself by completing this challenge by the end of February.
Improve sleep quality to >=80%
Having good sleep will help you lose weight.
As you can see below, I had an average 76 sleep score in 2022. It is evident that I didn’t wear my Fitbit to bed consistently.
The goal for this year is to improve sleep quality and get a sleep score of 80 or better. Achieving this will require me to go to bed early and get 8 hours of sleep consistently.
Finish landscape work by the fence
I chopped down the overgrown bamboo by our fence last summer but never finished the job properly. Right now the area is a massive big hole that needs to be filled and fixed up. I plan to finish the landscape work before the end of September so we can use this area again.
Fun Goals
Last year I didn’t accomplish any of my fun goals so I thought I’d try some of them again this year.
Go camping with family in the summer
Since BC park reservations get filled up quickly, Mrs. T and I will need to decide on a few dates and book the campsites when the reservation window opens up in the spring.
Bring the family along on a business trip
Not sure if this one is possible or not but it’d be really cool to bring my family along on one of my oversea business trips and then stay after for a week or two to tour around the area.
Go to Disneyland
This was a goal I had last year but we didn’t go to Disneyland and opted for a trip to the Maritimes. I’d like to see if it’s possible to bring the whole family to Disneyland. To make this trip as cheap as possible we’ll probably rely on tracking hacking.
Summary – 2023 Goals & Resolutions
Here you have it, my 13 goals for this year. For me, the ambitious goals will be reducing my body fat to 15% and improving sleep quality to 80 and above. I see both as personal challenges and I can’t wait to complete them.
Dear readers, did you set any 2023 goals or resolutions for yourself?
Great goals. Can you tell me how you go about projecting your future dividend income?
Thanks, see here – https://www.tawcan.com/dividend-growth-looking-back-12-years-and-looking-forward/
Great goals. For the bamboo make sure you get, like we did, that high density plastic barrier 3 feet deep surrounding the bamboo to prevent growth into the neighbours. Neighbours go nuts if they find bamboo shoots on their side and can be insurance issue
Thanks DadMB. Yup, very well aware that high density plastic barrier is needed.
Great goals as always Tawcan. I’m always impressed by your ability to so consistently. One of my goals is to post every week as well and boy is it hard. I’m glad to hear that you also hate writing SEO articles. They’re just plain boring!
Hi AL,
I find the trick for posting every week is to write ahead and plan out your articles. 🙂