Mid-Year Update: My 2009 New Year’s Financial Goals

I had actually forgotten all about this, but back on January 1st I posted my New Year’s Resolutions for 2009.  A lot has happened since I wrote that post, not the least of which was getting a new job which has left me relatively little time to work on my internet side projects.  Thus, it’s no surprise I’m not quite on track to meet most of this year’s goals.  What is a surprise is just how ambitious my goals were at that time.  All I can say is, what was I thinking?!? Even had I not gotten a new job and was able to work full-time on my internet projects, I can’t for the life of me figure out why I thought the majority of those goals were even remotely achievable.

How Am I Doing?

I broke my goals for 2009 down into three sections:  my personal finances, goals for this blog, and goals for my Spanish blog.  Since the year is now almost two thirds over, I’m in a pretty good position to estimate how close I will come to meeting my original goals semi-accurately.

Personal Finance Goals

Goal: Increase my net worth by 50%
Status: On Track - Thanks to the robust recovery beginning in the first quarter and diligent saving on my part, I’m well on my way to meeting this goal.  I should be able to comfortably achieve this goal even if the market stays flat the rest of the year, so barring another financial crisis, I’m in the clear.

Goal: Save 30% of my gross income
Status: On Track - Thankfully, I started a new job at the beginning of February, so I’ve been able to save a large portion of my income every month since then.  Huge increases in my internet income (partly using my niche mini site strategy, but mostly from my two main blogs) certainly hasn’t hurt my savings rate, either.

Goal: Buy a rental property by the end of the year
Status: Fail - Hasn’t happened and isn’t going to.  Honestly, I’m 90% sure real estate isn’t a road I want to take anymore, since I’m sold on the advantages of REITs over rental properties.  I just don’t think landlording is for me.  But who knows, I may change my mind if and when I have more capital to invest.

Goal: Get a new job
Status: Success

Amateur Asset Allocator Goals

Goal: Increase blog traffic by 20% per month
Status: Epic Fail – In order to accomplish this goal, I would have had to have built this blog into one of the top 5 personal finance blogs on the internet.  That would be a pretty tall order even if I were able to work on it full-time.  Working only part-time, this goal was downright unattainable.  In reality, I’ve managed to grow traffic a bit over 10% per month so far this year.  That’s a solid growth rate, but nothing spectacular.  Still, if I’m able to maintain that growth rate for another 12 months I should be earning a sufficiently-large income to quit my day job and focus on my web activities full-time, which would be great.  Not holding my breath, though.

Goal: Bring search traffic down to 50% of overall traffic
Status: Fail - Search traffic is still around 70% of overall traffic, on average. I guess I really can’t complain that Google insists on sending more and more traffic every month. C’est la vie. This remains a goal, but I don’t see how I’ll be able to accomplish it consistently by the end of the year.

Goal: Average 30 posts per month
Status: Fail - In reality, I’ve averaged about 20 posts per month. When I made this goal, I was assuming I wouldn’t be able to find a job and would be working on web projects full-time. Thankfully, I was overly pessimistic about my job prospects. A 20-post-per-month clip is quite good for a part-time effort, methinks.

Goal: Write at least one article per week for article marketing
Status: Fail - Again, this goal was predicated on me being able to focus on my web businesses full-time.  In reality, I’ve averaged about one per month.  I should probably pick up the pace a bit.

Goal: Generate $2000 per month by year end
Status: Surpassed - I surpassed this goal at some point earlier this year.  I’m not quite willing to reveal when or by how much, but I can say that success in this arena has largely been driven by increases in profitability, since my traffic hasn’t increased nearly enough to drive these kinds of results.

Learn Spanish On Your Own Goals

Goal: Increase blog traffic by 20% per month
Status: Epic Fail – Again, I’m not even close. My real growth rate is about 11% per month, which is stellar considering how little I post.

Goal: Average 20 posts per month
Status: Epic Fail – I have pretty much given up trying to maintain any sort of regular posting schedule on this blog: I simply don’t have the time. Instead, I do lots of keyword research and focus on low-hanging fruit to get the most out of the time spent. I wish I could write more often, but there’s just no way I could find the time. I post once or perhaps twice per week (if I’m lucky).

Goal: Write at least 2 articles per week for article marketing
Status: Epic Fail - I write perhaps one per month. I definitely need to work on this because when I actually do it, I’ve found article marketing to be  pretty effective.

Goal: Generate $1500 per month
Status: Epic Fail – While Amateur Asset Allocator has surpassed my income expectations, Learn Spanish On Your Own has disappointed somewhat. I think $750 per month by the end of the year is attainable if I work hard, but $1500 ain’t gonna happen. Furthermore, I think $1000 per month is probably the high-end limit of the “Learn Spanish” niche unless I branch out into related topics or write more Spanish product reviews (which I dislike doing because I don’t think it offers as much benefit to my readers).  However, I have seen decent success promoting Rosetta Stone and Pimsleur and still see moderate growth potential there, although nothing spectacular.  I’ve also had decent luck selling Rosetta Stone used, which I found somewhat surprising since it’s nearly impossible to find more than a 15-20% discount buying used anywhere online.

In Conclusion

Overall, it looks like I’ve failed miserably with most of my financial and business goals for the year.  The few goals I met I’ve mostly blown out of the water, but the ones I’ve missed?  Let’s just say I am obviously no psychic.  Oh well, there’s always next year.