Each year I set a variety of goals for myself, and I post quarterly updates on my progress. I find that this helps keep me both motivated and accountable.

You can read the introduction to my goals for the year in my 2018 goals post. I posted my progress at the end of Q1 and again at the end of Q3. And now, 3.5 months after 2018 is over, I’m finally getting around to seeing how I did on my goals for 2018.

Overall, 2018 was a great year. We had a great year for our income, including the ability to exercise six figures worth of stock options. My transition to a new career as a financial planner has been going well, and my family is healthy and happy.

Unfortunately, none of that translated into much progress on the goals I’d set for myself at the beginning of the year.

Here’s the breakdown on how the year turned out:

As you can see, I only hit one of my 2018 goals. Yikes.

Financial

Goal 1: Generate passive income of more than $70,000 for the year

Q1 goal: $16,000
Q1 actual: $15,528

Q2 goal: $33,000
Q2 actual: $33,641

Q3 goal: $51,000
Q3 actual: $50,959

Q4 goal: $70,000
Q4 actual: $68,978

This is the miss that hurts the most. We were so, so, soooo close to hitting our goal of $70,000 for the year and we just missed it by about $1,000. Our dividend income was on track but we had a string of low income from our rental properties, including a ~$2,800 loss in November that put this goal just out of reach.

Of course, that’s how real estate investing works – the cash flow is lumpy. You have the occasional repairs, vacancies, income tax payments, and insurance payments that can affect your results in any given month.

Status: Near miss

Goal 2: Net worth of $5.5M

Q1 goal: $5.125M
Q1 actual: $5.185M

Q2 goal: $5.125M
Q2 actual: $5.19M

Q3 goal: $5.375M
Q3 actual: $5.368M

Q4 goal: $5.5M
Q4 actual: $5.22M

Meeting this goal was almost entirely dependent on how the markets performed for the year. Yes, we save and invest money, but a 10% drop in the market will reduce our net worth by more than my entire pre-tax salary in a year.

We were pretty much on track to hit this goal all year but our net worth dropped in October before recovering in November and December. The October drop put this goal just out of reach.

Status: Near mis

Goal 3: Investigate additional real estate investment

Q2 goal: Done
Q2 actual: Not started
Q3 actual: Not started
Q4 actual: Not started

This is a carryover from last year. I am giving myself a few ways to achieve this goal:

  • Do the math on paying down one or more existing rental properties and/or primary mortgage
  • Investigate and buy an additional rental property
  • Investigate some of the crowdsourced FinTech real estate companies out there

I did none of the above in 2018.

Status: Failure

Work

Goal 4: Pass Series 65 exam

Mission Accomplished!

This is the first goal that I have completed for the year. Frankly, it took a LOT more time that I expected. In fact, I almost certainly spent a lot more time that I needed to on this goal.

I took the test on May 14, 2018. A passing score on the exam is a 72%. My goal was to get a 80% or higher on the test, and I ended up getting a 92%. 

Status: Done!

Goal 5: Start building client base

Q1 goal: 1 client
Q1 actual: 1 client

Q2 goal: 2 clients
Q2 actual: 1 client

Q3 goal: 3 clients
Q3 actual: 1 client

Q4 goal: 4 clients
Q4 actual: 2 clients

I signed my first clients in Q1 and I didn’t sign anybody new in Q2 or Q3. However, a brief conversation with a friend from college turned into a new client.

I’m realizing that getting new clients is tough when you’re not working full-time in the field. Actually, I’m sure that getting new clients is tough even when you ARE working full-time in the field. And, the reality is that I didn’t really proactively do anything to get new clients. I didn’t join any groups. I didn’t network. I didn’t introduce myself to others in the field.

Also, although I didn’t hit my goal, I’m not actually that upset by this failure.

Status: Failure

Personal Goals

Goal 6 – Read one book per month

Q1 goal: 3 books
Q1 actual: 0 books

Q2 goal: 6 books
Q2 actual: 0 books

Q3 goal: 9 books
Q3 actual: 1 book

Q4 goal: 12 books
Q4 actual: 4 books

This ended up being a failure for the year but a success for the quarter. That is, my goal was to read a book per month and I had only read 1 book through the end of Q3, but I ended up reading 4 books in Q4.

Here’s the reality on this goal – the only reason I didn’t reach my goal for the year is because I got lazy. I was spending my time reading magazines, blogs, and browsing the web instead of reading books. The puzzling thing is that I LIKE reading books. I find them more satisfying than the short format stuff.

This is a goal I’m going to set again for 2019 and I’m quite confident that I’ll hit it.

Status: Failure

Goal 7 – Squat 300 lbs

Goal 8 – Bench 275 lbs

Goal 9 – Deadlift 375 lbs

I’m just going to group all of these strength goals together, because the progress on all of them has been the same – non-existent.

It’s not from a lack of working out or effort. Rather, it’s that I’ve been refocusing on goal 10 (below), and the reality is that strength and weight are almost always inversely correlated.

Ultimately, I realized I wasn’t going to hit any of my physical goals, and I decided I’d shoot for a reasonable comprise between strength and leanness. I ended up backing off my body fat goal a bit (by eating more) and, as expected, my strength went up a bit.

Status: Failure

Goal 10 – Body fat 10%

Q1 goal: 13%
Q1 actual: 12.7%

Q2 goal: 12%
Q2 actual: 12.5%

Q3 goal: 11%
Q3 actual: 11.2%

Q4 goal: 10%
Q4 actual: 11.5%

I ended Q4 at 11.5%, but about halfway through the quarter I was down to about 10.5% body fat. At the beginning of Q4 I decided to try a ketogenic diet and it worked really well. In fact, it worked too well. Weight was just falling off of me, and while at least some of the weight was water weight, I got to the point where all of my pants were uncomfortably loose around the waist.

I realized that I didn’t want to go out and buy all new pants, so ultimately I decided to stop the keto diet and gain at least some of the weight back.

Status: Failure

Blog Goals

Goal 11 – Post 2x/week

Q1 goal: 24 posts
Q1 actual: 13 posts

Q2 goal: 48 posts
Q2 actual: 20 posts

Q3 goal: 72 posts
Q3 actual: 28 posts

Q4 goal: 48 posts
Q4 actual: 45 posts

Much like my book reading goal, this was a failure for the year but at least a partial success for the quarter. Through the end of Q3 I had been publishing about 9 posts per quarter and in Q4 I published 17 posts.

Ultimately, I realized that my goal for The Money Commando blog is quality, not quantity. I’d rather post sparingly and have each post be high quality than try to adhere to an artificial publishing schedule that would likely result in at least some of the posts being lower quality.

Status: Failure

Conclusion

Let’s look at the final scorecard:

Successes – 1
Near misses – 2
Failures – 8

Wow. That’s pretty terrible.

Looking back on the year, I think there are a few reasons I didn’t hit most of my goals.

First, many of my goals were mutually exclusive. For example, hitting the passive income goal largely depended on a drop in the stock market so that we could deploy some (or all) of our cash. However, a drop in the stock market would have made it impossible to hit our net worth goals. Similarly, my body fat and strength goals were mutually exclusive.

Second, I was just plain lazy on a few of the goals. There’s no reason I couldn’t have taken 5 hours over the course a few nights to research some real estate investments or crack open a new book.

Finally, the goal of signing a new client each quarter was just plain unrealistic. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it’s going to be tough to add new clients until I am able to devote sufficient time to this.

I’m going to take the lessons I’ve learned here and apply them to the creation of my 2019 goals.