2013 Financial Goals: Making a Budget

Looking at my Wheel (or Table?) of Life, one section jumped out at me in particular: finances. This year was a hard hit for us.  Between cars, vet bills, and my husband losing his job temporarily, we experienced some extreme set backs that depleted any savings we had.

Finances would take seven goals to make us completely happy with our current status.  But I had no idea what these seven goals should be.  Because of this, I decided to create a budget.  I highly suggest that anyone looking to make any financial goals should start the same way.  By doing a quick search, there are a plethora of budget worksheets online - in fact, there's one right here.  Nabbing one, I began sorting out my family finances.  

The first thing I looked at was all of our monthly and yearly bills.  This included everything from rent and utilities, to groceries and our once-a-year auto insurance bill.  I even factored in things like vet bills, even though some of our pets won't need to be vaccinated next year, and left a huge budget for car repairs since that's what devastated us last year.  On top of it, I factored in a miscellaneous expenses category and a monthly spending box so we weren't living penny to penny.  This budget had plenty of wiggle room if things went wrong and we still had money to spare!

The next step was looking at some things that needed to be fixed or replaced.  My husband needs two new tires on his car.  We could desperately use a new mattress and box spring for our bed.  I'm currently illustrating on a refurbished very basic Wacom Bamboo.  I could really use a better tablet that won't die on me every few days.  And this month, our digital camera went out.  We could stand to get a replacement if money allowed, which it did.  I tallied all of these in and split that total between 12 months.  We now had an idea of how much we needed to be saving every month to be able to replace all of the above by December.

Sorting this out also helped me to see how many commissions I, as a freelancing illustrator, would need to take on this year.  This would later contribute to my Career goals.  I was already starting to see goals for other sections just by tackling one item for the biggest area of my life that needed some attention.  This was working out well!

In the end, this all severely depended on us keeping that budget every month.  So that became my first goal.  My second goal was to make my target income - without that, staying on the budget wouldn't be possible.

From the budget, I took the idea of replacing items and put that in as one of the goals.  If we could get everything I listed replaced, I would feel much better about our finances.

I then looked at how much money we had left over.  It was quite a bit more than I had ever anticipated.  Enough that we could rebuild the emergency savings we lost in 2012 in just one year.  I split that into three chunks and created three more goals for my finances sheet.

Finally, I looked at my husband's student loans.  We're desperate to get them off our backs.  After rebuilding our savings, we had enough left over that we could pay off his smallest student loan.  That became my final financial goal of this year.

Amounts Removed for Privacy

Next time on The Progressive Planner: My Health Goals for 2013

What is one financial goal you'd like to make for yourself in 2013?