2011 Goal Update (November)
This is my eleventh monthly report on how I’m doing with my goals for 2011:
- Build a dining room table. Build a piano keyboard desk. Build something. Still nothing. Probably not going to happen.
- Launch twelve new websites. Created a quick and easy text conversion tool called ASCII to Hex. It converts to/from ASCII, binary, hexadecimal, base64, decimal, and rot13. I also put a lot of work into the Fake Mail Generator. I revived this site a few months back and have been trying to modernize it a bit. I’ve added a new logo and added MIME parsing, so it can display HTML emails.
I’ve also been working on a few goals that I didn’t originally blog about:
- Start an email newsletter. I don’t think this is going to happen.
- Create a game
for mobile phones. Probably not going to happen.
Goals I’ve accomplished this year:
- Earn as much from my side business as I was earning from my day job. I hit this goal in October.
- Go back to college. I’ve enrolled in a distance learning program with BYU-Idaho.
- Max out my 401k and Roth IRA contributions. The 401k and Roth IRAs are maxed out. Yay!
- Quit my day job. I’m basically retired. I play with my daughter, work on hobbies, and sleep all day. Its a pretty good life.
- Become a dad. I’m a dad! Yay! My daughter Anna was born in late May.
- Publish my first book. I’ve published my first book (paperback, Kindle, and Nook). Took me a couple years, and I
already found 2 typos (grr!)fixed the typos, but at least it is finally in print. - Paid my taxes. I make money from a lot of places which makes my taxes really complicated, so getting this finished was awesome. I also started paying quarterly taxes because my self-employed income has gotten pretty high. It is uber painful to write a big check every couple months to the IRS, but oh well, that is the cost of making money..
- Get out of debt. We’ve paid off the last of Becca’s student loans which means we are now debt free! Yay!
Half-birthday investment gift
My baby girl had her first half-birthday yesterday. It is crazy to think that it has been 6 months already since my first “holy cow I’m a dad” moment.
Anyways, my wife and I have a lot of goals for how to raise our daughter. We want her to have the resources to go to college, start a business, buy a car, go on a mission, or do whatever she wants when she leaves the nest in many many years. We also want her to be excited about investing, to understand how it works, and to see the benefits of it.
So tonight, after a few months of pondering, we settled on a plan: for Anna’s half-birthday each year, we’ll invest $250 into GE for her (keeping it in our name until she is old enough to really understand it).
Why GE? It pays dividends every quarter. She’ll get to see returns from the investment several times a year, even if the stock prices are down. We’ll reinvest the dividends, so she’ll also get to see her number of shares going up each quarter, even when it isn’t her half-birthday yet. GE is also very stable and diversified, so the likelihood of it disappearing is slim. It also tends to be cheap enough per share that we can get a decent number of shares.
There are a few cons to going with GE. Its performance hasn’t been phenomenal over the past decade. There are definitely stocks that have done better (and many that have done worse). It also isn’t a very exciting stock. A kid today would be much more excited about owning some Apple stock than they would about GE.
Why not a mutual fund? Well the goal is to teach Anna about stocks, investing, and to get her excited about it. It is hard to see why a mutual fund’s price has gone up or down. With an individual stock, like GE, we can look at the news or read press releases to find out why the price has changed. We can also talk about how the policies and decisions of our elected leaders can affect the price. I imagine her coming to me and being like “oh my gosh dad the GE earnings report is out!”, and then we’ll sit down together and look over it. (A father can dream…)
We plan on investing $250 each year and, unless she has a dang good reason, we won’t let her take it out until her 18th birthday. This means we’ll invest $4,500 for her over the next 18 years. If my parents had done this for me, then I would have had about $22,000 on my 18th birthday (and that isn’t even counting dividend reinvestments). Of course $250 was worth a lot more back then, and past performance doesn’t guarantee future performance, but I still think Anna will have a very healthy chunk of cash waiting for her.
Of course, I’m not sure how we’ll afford this once we get up to 8 or 9 kids…
Read More2011 Goal Update (October)
This is my tenth monthly report on how I’m doing with my goals for 2011:
- Read the Book of Mormon again. I’ve abandoned this goal because I’ve started taking a Book of Mormon class.
- Earn as much from my side business as I was earning from my day job. October was another awesome month. Earnings are way up, and I’ve exceeded my October and November and December goals, which means I’ve met this goal! I’m now earning as much from my side business (which is now my only source of income) as I was earning from my day job before I resigned back in July. I’ve increased my home business income by over 30% since July and I’m very excited to take some time next year to branch out into new revenue streams.
- Build a dining room table. Build a piano keyboard desk. Build something. Still nothing and I’m running out of time.
- Launch twelve new websites. I’ve been wanting a recipe site for quite awhile now. I started a small recipe blog called Recipe Kabob. Still needs work (it will always need work) but I’m happy with the progress I’ve made.
I’ve also been working on a few goals that I didn’t originally blog about:
- Start an email newsletter. I don’t think this is going to happen.
- Create a game
for mobile phones. I’d like to play around with making a game using HTML 5, canvas, JS, etc. Should be fun.
Goals I’ve accomplished this year:
- Go back to college. I’ve enrolled in a distance learning program with BYU-Idaho.
- Max out my 401k and Roth IRA contributions. The 401k and Roth IRAs are maxed out. Yay!
- Quit my day job. I’m basically retired. I play with my daughter, work on hobbies, and sleep all day. Its a pretty good life.
- Become a dad. I’m a dad! Yay! My daughter Anna was born in late May.
- Publish my first book. I’ve published my first book (paperback, Kindle, and Nook). Took me a couple years, and I
already found 2 typos (grr!)fixed the typos, but at least it is finally in print. - Paid my taxes. I make money from a lot of places which makes my taxes really complicated, so getting this finished was awesome. I also started paying quarterly taxes because my self-employed income has gotten pretty high. It is uber painful to write a big check every couple months to the IRS, but oh well, that is the cost of making money..
- Get out of debt. We’ve paid off the last of Becca’s student loans which means we are now debt free! Yay!
2011 Goal Update (September)
This is my ninth monthly report on how I’m doing with my goals for 2011:
- Read the Book of Mormon again. I’m still behind, but I’m making serious progress towards getting back on track. The difficulty is that I’ve started a Book of Mormon class which has me reading the Book of Mormon from the beginning.
- Earn as much from my side business as I was earning from my day job. The beginning of the month was pretty depressing. Earnings were way down. The end of the month has shown an incredible turn around, culminating with my highest earning day ever. I’m very close to being back on track, which is awesome after falling way behind last month.
- Build a dining room table. Build a piano keyboard desk. Build something. Still nothing.
- Launch twelve new websites. I’m on a quest to put all my dormant domains to use. This month I took namegenerator.in, which I’ve had for quite a few months, and finally put something up on it. I’m very satisfied with the outcome. Check it out at namegenerator.in.
I’ve also been working on a few goals that I didn’t originally blog about:
- Start an email newsletter. I’ve been planning on doing a dating tips newsletter to go along with The Awkward Turtle site, but I have a new site in mind that I’m pretty excited about and would work well with a newsletter, so maybe I’ll do that instead.
- Create a game
for mobile phones. I’d like to play around with making a game using HTML 5, canvas, JS, etc. Should be fun.
Goals I’ve accomplished this year:
- Go back to college. I’ve enrolled in a distance learning program with BYU-Idaho.
- Max out my 401k and Roth IRA contributions. The 401k and Roth IRAs are maxed out. Yay!
- Quit my day job. I’m basically retired. I play with my daughter, work on hobbies, and sleep all day. Its a pretty good life.
- Become a dad. I’m a dad! Yay! My daughter Anna was born in late May.
- Publish my first book. I’ve published my first book (paperback, Kindle, and Nook). Took me a couple years, and I
already found 2 typos (grr!)fixed the typos, but at least it is finally in print. - Paid my taxes. I make money from a lot of places which makes my taxes really complicated, so getting this finished was awesome. I also started paying quarterly taxes because my self-employed income has gotten pretty high. It is uber painful to write a big check every couple months to the IRS, but oh well, that is the cost of making money..
- Get out of debt. We’ve paid off the last of Becca’s student loans which means we are now debt free! Yay!
2011 Goal Update (August)
This is my eighth monthly report on how I’m doing with my goals for 2011:
- Read the Book of Mormon again. I’m still behind, but I’m making serious progress towards getting back on track.
- Earn as much from my side business as I was earning from my day job. If you didn’t notice, the economy took a tank this month. Fortunately my earnings didn’t plummet, but they didn’t go up either. I’m no longer on track to hit this goal.
- Build a dining room table. Build a piano keyboard desk. Build something. Still nothing.
- Launch twelve new websites. I added significant new functionality to the Fake Name Generator. I’ve made it possible to log in and save your names, track your orders, and things like that. I also created 32-bit or 64-bit, which lets you easily determine if you are running a 32-bit or 64-bit OS.
I’ve also been working on a few goals that I didn’t originally blog about:
- Max out my 401k and Roth IRA contributions. The 401k is maxed out. Yay! The stock market dropped. Boo!
- Start an email newsletter. I’ve been planning on doing a dating tips newsletter to go along with The Awkward Turtle site, but I have a new site in mind that I’m pretty excited about and would work well with a newsletter, so maybe I’ll do that instead.
- Create a game for mobile phones. Haven’t put any time into this yet. Maybe will be working on something with my brother.
Goals I’ve accomplished this year:
- Quit my day job. I’m basically retired. I play with my daughter, work on hobbies, and sleep all day. Its a pretty good life.
- Become a dad. I’m a dad! Yay! My daughter Anna was born in late May.
- Publish my first book. I’ve published my first book (paperback, Kindle, and Nook). Took me a couple years, and I
already found 2 typos (grr!)fixed the typos, but at least it is finally in print. - Paid my taxes. I make money from a lot of places which makes my taxes really complicated, so getting this finished was awesome. I also started paying quarterly taxes because my self-employed income has gotten pretty high. It is uber painful to write a big check every couple months to the IRS, but oh well, that is the cost of making money..
- Get out of debt. We’ve paid off the last of Becca’s student loans which means we are now debt free! Yay!
2011 Goal Update (July)
This is my seventh monthly report on how I’m doing with my goals for 2011:
- Read the Book of Mormon again. I’m less behind this month than I was last month, so I guess that is progress.
- Earn as much from my side business as I was earning from my day job. This month my earnings were only slightly higher than last month. I’m not very surprised by this because last month’s new site was pretty bad. I’m still on track to reach my goal though.
- Build a dining room table. Build a piano keyboard desk. Build something. If this heat wave would go away, I’d be building something awesome right now. (I know, another excuse…)
- Launch twelve new websites. This month’s site is 8-bit Sprites. It was a ton of fun to make, but requires a little maintenance every week. So far it isn’t earning its keep, but I think it will given a little bit of time. I also created my first WordPress plugin, CW Image Optimizer, which I’ve been informed is already being used on a few sites other than my own.
I’ve also been working on a few goals that I didn’t originally blog about:
- Max out my 401k and Roth IRA contributions. The 401k is maxed out. Yay! I’ve also been filling up our Roth IRAs.
- Start an email newsletter. I’ve been planning on doing a dating tips newsletter to go along with The Awkward Turtle site, but I have a new site in mind that I’m pretty excited about and would work well with a newsletter, so maybe I’ll do that instead.
- Create a game for mobile phones. Haven’t put any time into this yet. Maybe will be working on something with my brother.
Goals I’ve accomplished this year:
- Quit my day job. I’m basically retired. I play with my daughter, work on hobbies, and sleep all day. Its a pretty good life.
- Become a dad. I’m a dad! Yay! My daughter Anna was born in late May.
- Publish my first book. I’ve published my first book (paperback, Kindle, and Nook). Took me a couple years, and I
already found 2 typos (grr!)fixed the typos, but at least it is finally in print. - Paid my taxes. I make money from a lot of places which makes my taxes really complicated, so getting this finished was awesome. I also started paying quarterly taxes because my self-employed income has gotten pretty high. It is uber painful to write a big check every couple months to the IRS, but oh well, that is the cost of making money..
- Get out of debt. We’ve paid off the last of Becca’s student loans which means we are now debt free! Yay!