February 2, 2008 – January Goals Recap

One month into the year and it already seems like so much has happened. A month ago Marilyn and I were still up in Tennessee getting ready to drive home. 🙂

Get office setup – This is about 80% done. Although I haven’t gotten to the wall-art phase, the rest of the room is finished. Marilyn also worked on her computer room and it’s looking beautiful as well. I’ll probably make a picture post soon with how it’s turned out. February Goal: Maybe get some artwork or posters if anything catches my eye.

Simplify as much as possible – Bills are all automated, gmail is organized (using Better Gmail) and filters, but there’s still a lot of clutter in two rooms in our house. Did clear out a few garbage bags of paperwork, but next month will be the big clear out over craiglist/gmail. Organized computer stuff quite a bit, and updated music and started using Last.fm again. February Goal: I’d love to sell a lot of stuff this month, and giveaway whatever I can. Ideally I’d like to get all the clutter in the house down to just the garage, which isn’t too much of a stretch. Also sell the mini this month.

Continue working on web passion projects – Worked on this some, but not a huge amount. Spent more time organizing the big Adogo meetup and reading a lot about Rails, but didn’t work on my project all that much. Next week I’m going to acts_as_conference though, so that should be fun February Goal: This is a fun one, think the project is going well, so just a matter of sticking with it. Might try to set some short term timelines for the month to try to stick to.

Post more on blogs – Wrote a lot more this month! I’d turned from a writer to a reader over the second half of last year, but you don’t learn as much on that side of the page. Posted quite a bit on my tech blog, and ended up posting here thanks to a cool wordpress plugin. February Goal: Keep it up, and maybe post more on Floridiots. That site was actually making some money last year when I was posting on it, and it would be cool to get it to that point again.

Fitness/Health Goals – This is the one I failed at the most over the last month. From my count, I went to the gym twice and jogged 2 or 3 times. Far from the amount I was going for. There was a big project at work for me and a few other guys though (some people were working 70+ hours/wk :/), so that knocked our schedule off. We’re all planning on getting back on track next week though, so hopefully between that for weights, and the occasional jogging should be good. This is definitely not a priority though. February Goals: Try jogging 2 days a week and weights 2 days for the 4 weeks.

Financial goals – Damn man. January sucked for anyone who owned stocks. Basically was down 13% from the high in October, and now back up to where it’s only down 6.5%. I did file the paperwork to take more control over my accounts though. Turns the plan I’m on had a cost ratio of 1.5%, and by changing to an advised account it goes down to 1%. Since most mutual funds have a fee of 1% anyways, I think it’s a good deal. Plus I’m more in control of it and able to make changes whenever I need, which took days with the previous type of account I had. Added a few podcasts and feeds that have helped with this, as well as a talk and a lot of questions for my broker.

February Goal: Try to make a little extra income by selling whatever I can.