Setting My Financial Goals in 2020

If you are looking for ideas to help you set financial goals in 2020, stick around. I am collabing with Kelly with Freedom in a Budget and Brad with The Fin Mindset, so stick around. You won't want to miss this. Hey guys, what's up? It's Justine with Debt-Free Millennials, the channel to help you crush debt and live a debt-free life. If you are new to the channel, I welcome all millennials who are interested in living debt-free, and part of that is actually making realistic financial goals for the new year so that you can set the tone, get ---- done, and make things happen with your finances. I've been working on my budget with my husband, well, pretty much the entire time we've been married and even before that. I was looking through my budget. I think that's the number one thing if you are looking to set your own financial goals for next year is to take a look at your budget. Look at how you've spent money in the past and then ask yourself, how does that make you feel? Look at how you've saved money and ask yourself, how does that make you feel? I do a year-end review with my husband, Kyle, and we sit down and see exactly how much money we've spent in different areas and then say, is this a priority for us? Or if it isn't, knowing that we need to make some changes. So I want to go over what my goals are in 2020 and maybe give you some ideas along the way. Okay, so first things first, we are trying to max out Kyle's thrift savings plan. That's commonly known as a TSP. It is a 401k program and we are actively looking to maximize that out and I think he said we have to bump it up a couple hundred bucks per paycheck and so we are really looking at maximizing that first before we try to maximize out any of our other retirement accounts. Also, side note, if you are wondering how we are doing our investing strategy, you definitely need to read The Simple Path to Wealth by JL Collins. That definitely changed our perspective on things. We self-manage pretty much all of our investments. We don't work with a financial advisor and the number one rule here is just maxing out your employer plan first, followed by all the other steps that JL lists in his book. Excellent read, highly recommend it. The next thing that we're working on in 2020 is we are saving up for a Jeep Wrangler, which I'm having low-key mixed thoughts about right now because this has been a dream car for us. Kyle really wants to get top of the line. Honestly, I'd be happy with a really run-down older Jeep, something that I could take to the beach and just, I don't give a ---- if it gets dirty, but the kind that he is wanting to get, which honestly I wouldn't care if we got that one either, is around $30,000. Now, we've already saved over six grand for this car in this past year alone. I'm hoping that we can save an additional $12,000 in 2020. I think we can make that happen knowing we have some extra paychecks for next year and we are typically really good at having money left over in our budget every single month because my income fluctuates all the time, so I could see us moving additional money into the Jeep Wrangler fund. The next goal that we have for 2020 is to continue to increase our down payment. We initially had a goal to make $60,000 in our down payment and we hit that goal, check, done. Then our goal was $70,000 for this year, hit that goal, so that's done. So now I'm wondering, can we do $85,000 for a down payment? Now, we were saving for 10% down in San Diego. A starter home, a typical starter home here in San Diego is going to run about $600,000, which is insane. I'm from Kansas originally. My husband's from Nebraska, so we definitely had sticker shock out here, but this is what we're aiming for. So if things change with the housing market, hopefully we can get in and we'll have a really big lump of cash to work with and be more willing to negotiate and actually negotiate with some power. So I am really looking forward to continuing to build that. Our lease is up in April, we're renters. If things stay the same and our rent isn't increased dramatically, we definitely want to stay in our unit. We love our place, we love our neighbors, and we'll just keep saving for that down payment. Now, if those ideas are like, I don't really know, think about the basics. Do you have a fully funded emergency fund? Are you debt free? If you aren't, what debts are you going to tackle in 2020? How can you organize them so that it feels manageable and that you're making headway? Now, I personally use the Debt Snowball to pay off $35,000 in student loan debt, but maybe you're working debt avalanche and you're starting with the highest interest rate. Regardless, you need to pick a plan and stick with it and focus on that first debt. Ignore everything else, pay the minimums on everything else, but focus on that first debt and maybe that's your priority. Maybe your priority is to get your spending under control and that first starts with the budget. So maybe your financial goal is just to start a regular monthly habit of budgeting. Whatever it may be, comment below and let me know what you're doing so I can hold you accountable and then in turn you can hold me accountable with my goals. I've got to get that TSP contribution up, so I guess that means I just need to harass Kyle to go ahead and bump up his contributions and we'll make that happen. Thank you so much for checking out this video. I think it's kind of scary to talk about your financial goals because they may seem more or less than somebody around you, but remember, you do you. It's you and only you who can tell yourself whether to start or to quit and there's nothing too big or small about your goals or about my goals because we're all on our own financial journey. Thank you guys so much for sticking around and we'll catch you in another video.