Year-End Financial Goals Results

On January 1st of this year, I enumerated a list of very specific New Years Financial Goals pertaining to my own personal finances, career goals, and my online businesses.  Then in August I published a mid-year update on my progress.  Many I was on track for, some I had already achieved, and some I had all but given up on.  Here’s how things wound up.

Personal Finance Goals

Goal: Increase my net worth by 50%
Status: Great Success! – Thanks to a robust recovery, my aggressive asset allocation, and a whole lot of saving, I’ve managed to surpass this goal fairly easily.  Increasing my net worth at a rapid pace is the key to my early retirement plans.

Goal: Save 30% of my gross income
Status: Great Success!  – I just barely met this goal.  I’m talking within less than $100.  But a win is a win!

Goal: Buy a rental property by the end of the year
Status: Fail - As I stated in my mid-year update, I’ve since decided being a small-time landlord probably isn’t for me.  Real estate investing can be a great way to build wealth, but it just doesn’t appeal to me.  I’ll stick to REITs.

Goal: Get a new job
Status: Great Success! - Now I just have to keep from getting fired.

Online Business Goals

At the beginning of the year, I had two primary online properties:  Amateur Asset Allocator and Learn Spanish On Your Own.  I’ve since added Early Retirement Blog to the mix, but it’s still in the development phase and has yet to contribute to the bottom line.  I have ideas for another one or two sites I’d like to build in the future, but they will have to wait until I either quit my day job to focus on my business full-time or President Obama adds another 4 hours to the day.

Amateur Asset Allocator Goals

Goal: Increase blog traffic by 20% per month
Status: Epic Fail – Not even close.  My actual number was just under 10%, which isn’t particularly impressive.  Still, I more than tripled my traffic in 2009.  It’s tempting to blame this failure on the search engines, since a spat with Google led to a 30% reduction in traffic during November and December.  The more likely explanation, though, is that I slacked off quite a bit from the beginning of March until the end of July.  Since then, I’ve been much more focused and had a lot more luck building traffic.  I’ve since discovered, however, that I can squeeze far more income from a given amount of traffic than previously thought.  Understandably, I’ve been spending more time on that than raw traffic building.

Goal: Bring search traffic down to 50% of overall traffic
Status: Epic Fail - The last few months, search traffic as a percentage of overall traffic has actually gone up, averaging approximately 75% of total traffic.  It’s not that referral traffic hasn’t been rising, it’s that search traffic has been rising even faster.  And that’s no mistake, since I’ve been spending a lot of time on SEO lately.

Goal: Average 30 posts per month
Status: Epic Fail - I’ve averaged more like 18 posts per month.  However, 30 posts per month remains the goal and I do have a concrete plan in place to get there.  If you’d like to help me out, please, submit a guest post!

Goal: Write at least one article per week for article marketing
Status: Epic Fail - Not even close.  This remains a goal, but I don’t have a plan in place to get there.  I guess that’s something I need to work on next year.

Goal: Generate $2000 per month by year end
Status: Great Success! - I smashed this goal back in July and by now make quite a bit more, on average.  Like I said above, November and December have been a bit slower no thanks to a spat with Google, but things have improved dramatically on that front the past few weeks so I believe (hope) I will start off the new year with a bang.

Learn Spanish On Your Own Goals

Goal: Increase blog traffic by 20% per month
Status: Epic Fail – Again, I’m not even close. I’ve a little more than doubled traffic to that blog in 2009.  Then again, I haven’t posted since August.

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 - See above.

Goal: Generate $1500 per month
Status: Epic Fail – I don’t know what I as thinking with this one.  I gave up on that goal back in August and set a new goal: $750 per month.  Well, I missed that goal too, but I did come very close in November and December.  On the plus side, my Rosetta Stone Spanish and Pimsleur Spanish reviews are absolutely killing it.

In Conclusion

I’ve had a pretty mixed year, but I’ve accomplished all of the most important goals, which are:  increase my net worth, grow my income, build my business.