A year ago I set myself some specific financial goals to reach in 2006. Let’s see what I managed to accomplish:

Separate business and personal financial worlds. Done, I have separate business checking accounts and credit cards, and I run all of my business expenses through those accounts. I have also set up a special home office area in our house.

Open a SEP IRA for 2005 business income at Vanguard. Done, opened a SEP-IRA with $2,500, which I then later rolled over to combine with my existing Traditional IRA.

Do my taxes and research to maximize tax return. Used the advanced form of TurboTax to do this for 2006, for 2007 I will either have to do a lot more reading on how to do S-Corp taxes or use an accountant. Probably the latter.

Roll over Traditional IRA to Roth IRA. After much deliberation and procrastination, we finally initiated the conversion internally with Vanguard last week.

Implement Business Idea A, and have it not take too long to maintain. Decided against pursuing this due to various reasons. I have started writing up all my reasons for failure, but haven’t finished yet.
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(image fixed, it was wrong initially)

About My Credit Card Debt
Newer readers may be alarmed by my high levels of credit card debt. In short, I’m borrowing money for free and keeping it in safe investments while earning me interest. Along with other things, this helps me earn extra side income of thousands of dollars a year. Recently I put up a detailed series of posts on this 0% game. Please check it out first if you have any questions, it should contain answers to most of them.

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No, I didn’t forget! Over 100 people joined me in my Make A Goal Experiment and shared their goals. Since they are cached somewhere in a Google database by now, your goals are now a permanent piece of internet history.

Now to make it happen… I’m going to share a little tip my mom taught me. Whenever you are too lazy to study, exercise, or do a chore, tell yourself to just do it for five minutes. If you want to stop after that, fine. But you’ll be amazed. Once you do it for 5 minutes, most of the time you’ll keep doing it. I often do this with jogging. Sometimes I just come home after a circle around the block. But 90% of the time I go much longer.

Most of the goals involved a certain sum of money, be it for a house, debt repayment, or retirement. Applying my 5-minute trick, my suggestion is spend those 5 minutes and set up a small automatic transfer towards this goal today. Open an online savings account. Washington Mutual, Citibank, Capital One 360, whatever – They are all earning around 5% interest right now, are FDIC-insured, and you only need $1 to open. Or depending on your goal, start an automatic transfer into your 401k or an automatic billpay to a credit card.

With most of these services you can set up automatic transfers weekly, biweekly, monthly, quarterly, whenever. No matter what your goal is or what your budget is, you can make some sort of commitment. If you can only do $10 a week, that’s still a start. After a while, that $10 will feel like nothing and you can increase it.

As for me, I am going to set up an automatic transfer of $125 to my savings account every week. This won’t make me reach my goal 100%, but it will get me moving and build some momentum.

So here I am, 4am in the morning, and trying to think of something interesting/inspiring/useful to say about money. So here it is. If you haven’t already, you should set yourself a 6-month financial goal. Maybe it’s “I will pay off my credit card with the biggest balance.” Or “I will put $1,000 into an emergency fund.” It should be something challenging yet attainable. Making a goal increases the probability of it happening increase 15.8 times at least.

List your 6-month goal in the comments below. Leave a contact e-mail (will not be shared), make the name anonymous. If you check in with the same e-mail at the 3-month mark (February 16th, 2006) with a status update and also at the end of 6 months (May 16th, 2006) you will get some sort of prize, no matter if you reach it or not. Everyone! (Prize value will be non-zero, but don’t expect an iPod or anything.) I want to see what percentage of people actually reach their goals.

You have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Make your goal now!

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The second quarter of 2006 is over, time again to check in on my progress towards my 2006 Financial Goals. See my progress in Q1.

Separate business and personal financial worlds
Actually, I have recently incorporated my self-employed business as an S-Corporation. I’ve been meaning to write more about this, but I’ve found it hard to condense the information into a blog-sized bit. I’ve also learned a ton about setting up an IRS-recognized home office and tax deductions for self-employed businesses. More on this soon.

Roll over Traditional IRA to Roth IRA
I don’t think I’m going to do this anymore, given that we are not going to be in the 15% tax bracket like I thought we might this year. I will instead contribute more to other retirement accounts.
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