In mid-2021, I wrote a post defining my goals for the rest of the year. This exercise was very interesting and I would like to do it again for 2022. However, during my analysis at the end of the year, I had explained that some goals would not be repeated and that they would not all be “personal finance” oriented. Here is what it looks like for 2022.
How do I do it?
In 2019, I didn’t care about my finances and I knew that on average, I wasn’t spending more than I was earning and that was fine for me. I started to get interested in personal finance, frugality concepts and the FIRE movement in mid-2020 and this blog was born in February 2021. By the end of 2020, I had a clear vision and a financial plan in place. Here is the strategy I adopted:
- I track my expenses and revenues. Each expense is associated to a category. This allows me to optimize them. I do all this with an application, YNAB.
- At the end of each month, I report the status of my accounts on my home net worth calculator.
It takes me about 30 minutes at the end of each month, but it gives me a clear view of my savings rate, my spending categories, my net worth, and the performance of my investments.
What will change from 2021?
First, I will have two types of goals:
- Financial objectives
- Personal objectives
Firstly, the financial goals will be less numerous than last year, but just as important and challenging. Secondly, I have decided to also give great importance to more personal goals, which will be mainly oriented towards “sport, well-being and health”.
Why this change ?
Although this blog is very much focused on personal finance and investing, I’ve noticed that it’s just as important to live a healthy life, both health-wise and financially. As a result, I’ve come to some personal conclusions.
- Money doesn’t make you happy (okay, that’s not really from me, but I agree with it relatively).
- Money can contribute to happiness: indeed, not having money worries is nice.
- Money is useless if you are unhealthy.
- Money is useless if you don’t have real plans.
With these thoughts in mind, I realized that I was spending a lot of time on personal finances, investments and other projects, but this was to the detriment of a certain quality of life. Working in IT, I already spend between 8 and 10 hours a day in front of my PC. If we add the blog, the daily budget management, various projects (mining, crypto, website creation, etc.), I don’t have much time left for the rest. The persistence of the health situation we live in doesn’t help the situation: teleworking, limited activities, etc.
In short, I am more than motivated to include this new type of goal for 2022!
Financial objectives
Here is the list I have set for myself for 2022:
- Invest CHF 15’000 in the stock market (shares, ETF)
- Achieve a 50% savings rate
- Generate CHF 10,000 of additional income
To summarize, I’m going from 10 to 3 financial goals for 2022! This reduced list will allow me to be more focused and I hope to be able to achieve them all!
Important: I have listed them in order of priority! Indeed, it is very important to do so, because it will allow you to prioritize your actions.
Personal objectives
Let’s get into the news! Here are the challenges I set myself:
- Run 500 km
- Ride 750 km on a mountain bike
- Do at least 3 hours of sport per week
Well, it’s written on the marble! As you can see, I really hope to find a “healthy” pace between work, my family and my personal projects.
How I will communicate ?
As explained above, at the end of each month, I will do my little analysis and I will communicate a post detailing the past month! If you are reading this page, if you are interested in the content and if you are not yet a subscriber to my newsletter, it’s time 🙂 Indeed, subscribers receive all my new publications by e-mail.
In 2021, the posts were relatively long and took me a lot of time to complete. I will try to be more concise in 2022 🙂
1. [Finance] Invest CHF 15,000 in the stock market (shares, ETF)
First very important financial goal! My money must work for me and make babies! My stock market investment strategy must be kept simple and quick. I don’t want to spend my days buying and selling. Once a month, I feed my Interactive Broker account and invest mainly in two ETFs:
- Vanguard Total World Stock ETF (VT) –> You can still (for the time being) buy this ETF as a Swiss citizen via Interactive Broker.
- iShares Core SPI® ETF (CH) – (CHSPI)
These two ETFs represent about 80% of my portfolio, the rest being various undervalued (or even slaughtered) stocks on which I hope to make a good return by selling them in a few months / years.
My strategy with ETFs is clearly long term (20 years) whereas with my stocks, the goal is to sell them as soon as a certain return is reached. All the gains I make with stocks, I reinvest them following my strategy of 80% ETF, 20% stocks. I am planning a post detailing my portfolio and explaining my strategy in more detail.
2. [finances] Achieve a savings rate of 50%.
In 2021, I did not achieve this goal and I intend to try again this year! To invest, you need money. To have more money to invest, you either have to earn more or spend less. The best way is to do both. If you manage to earn more money without increasing your standard of living, all the surplus can be invested and in principle, the more you invest, the more your money works for you and the more babies it will make 🙂
Achieving this rate is quite challenging with one child and Mrs. GP working at 60%, but it is still realistic. In order to calculate this rate, I have to track all of my cash inflows and expenses. As already mentioned, I do it with this great application, YNAB.
3. [finances] Generate CHF 10,000 of additional income
In 2021, this was my last goal and the amount was set at 2’000.- CHF. It doesn’t matter if it’s passive or active income, the important thing is that at the end of the year, I have somehow managed to generate that extra 10K. As I write this, this amount seems huge, but I’m going to include all kinds of income possible, namely:
- Profit from my various investments, including dividends
- Sale of items to individuals
- Sale of services to individuals (websites, financial support, computer support, etc.)
- Income generated by my crypto mining project
- Income generated by a second crypto project (it’s already in place, but I’m planning a post, so I’ll keep the suspense 🙂 )
I admit that this last objective is challenging, but at the same time, it is the one that motivates me the most. It will allow me to realize if my different investments are working or not. It will also force me to dig a little in my head to find ideas to generate cash.
4. [personal] – Living a healthy life
I’m putting my 3 sports goals together in this paragraph, because they are all somewhat related. Indeed, I’m going to put a special focus on regular physical activities in order not to spend 15 hours a day in front of screens and 23 hours a day inside. Whether it’s running or mountain biking, I already have everything I need to practice, so no excuses :-).
After thinking about these goals, I realized that they will also help motivate me to do other things like:
- Bike to work
- Running at lunchtime
- Use my car less
hese are just examples, but they are a good source of additional personal motivation. As far as food is concerned, I don’t make it a goal, because the GP family is very conscious of this area. I’m not saying that we never eat fast food, but we cook every day for every meal. I have written specific posts on this subject.
- Frugality – How to save between 400 and 600 CHF/month
- Frugality – Ham croissants for 0.18 CHF/piece [french only]
PS: the croissants are very tasty 🙂
Conclusion
Like last year, I’m so happy I took the time to do this exercise and I hope the goals I set for myself will motivate me enough throughout the year! What about you? Do you set any goals for yourself? Any good resolutions? Feel free to share them in the comments! Thanks and a++
