Goals for 2018

With the new year upon us, I took some time and thought about the goals I would like to achieve during 2018. I decided to put my goals into three categories this year: Financial, Fitness and Personal development. Without further ado, let’s start with what I came up with for the upcoming year.

Financial

1. Grow passive income portfolio to €11000

My current portfolio of dividend paying stocks and loans for P2P lending sums up to ~€4500. I will try to contribute €500 to my portfolio every month so at the end of the year it should add up to €10500 not considering price and currency changes. Hopefully, I will be able to contribute more funds to the portfolio some months and maybe the value will increase a bit, so I think it’s a stretch but it’s possible to reach this goal if everything goes according to plan.

2. Receive €240 in passive income

I received €105 in passive income during 2017. I think that with constant contributions to my portfolio and some dividend increases I should at least double my goal for 2017 which was €100. With some consideration I decided to set my goal to €240 which would round up to €20/month. My current portfolio (if no companies cut their dividend) should bring home only about ~€160 so I will really need to start contributing to my portfolio fast to try and achieve this goal.

3. Start tracking my budget

Even though I try to think where my money goes, I never managed to have a budget so far. I think it would be useful to know exactly how much we spend on each category so I decided to start tracking my expenses during 2018. I guess I will just create an Excel spreadsheet but if you have some suggestions of apps/excel templates I could use, please let me know in comments.

Fitness

1. Run a marathon in 3:45

I ran my first marathon in 2017 and finished it in 4:06. The training was not ideal and I will do my best to improve my result during 2018. I would need to improve my pace by 40s/km to achieve this but I hope that with proper training I will be able to achieve that.

2. Finish “Lithuanian Triathlon Cup” in top 50%

I took a year off from triathlon in 2017 and plan to come back to it in 2018. When i was participating in triathlon, I usually would end up in the lower end of the field. I hope to improve my results by consistent training and participating in all the events to improve my chances in final classification. I already bought entry to all events that are organized by “Lithuanian Triathlon Cup” which will consist of 7 events so I got my triathlon calendar covered up already. With the first stage coming up at the end of April, I should start training already.

3. Finish “XTrasa” cup in top 40%

This is another competition I am participating in. It’s a series of running events which is interesting due to toughness of the stages. Running takes place in very hilly places with some natural obstacles and you need to climb/descend a lot. The cup consists of 6 events and I already completed 2 of them. As with the triathlon, I am not one of the top runners but with consistent participation, I hope to end up in the top 40% in the final classification.

4. Complete Half-Ironman distance triathlon

With my participation in the Lithuanian Triathlon Cup, I will also have an opportunity to compete in a Half-Ironman distance event. It consists of 1,9km swim, 90km bike and 21,1km run. Participation in Ironman brand organized events is quite expensive (~€300 for the ticket and additional travel/accomodation expenses) so I am glad that a similar event will take place in Lithuania this year and the price will not come close to what the original event would cost.

Personal Development

1. Read 12 books

My favorite shop in any shopping mall is a book store. Unfortunately, I often end up with buying a lot of books and not reading them 😀 So the goal for this year is quite simple – to reduce the backlog of my books by reading at least one book a month.

2. Write 52 blog posts

I started this blog in August 2017 and wrote 3-4 posts a month. I noticed that it’s sometimes hard to find motivation to sit down and write something, especially knowing that my audience is quite small. However, if I start writing something, I usually can come up with something so I know that the most important thing is to try and do it. Therefore, I decided to try and write at least 52 blog posts which means one post for each week during 2018.

3. New IT certification / training

I am also planning to earn some IT certification to become a better employee or advance in my career. I am not sure which one I am going to take this year but I have some ideas already. I will update this one during the year once I know which training/certification will best suit my needs.

 

So that’s what I will try to achieve during 2018. I wouldn’t like to call these New Year Resolutions as I was doing most of the things for at least a few years already. I will just try to get better/achieve more at what I do.

Have you come up with your goals for the new year already? Do you like setting goals for yourself or do you think it’s a waste of time? Let me know in comments below 🙂