My wife and I had our weekly meeting last night and I'll give you some of the highlights. It had been a couple of months since our last meeting so there was quite a bit to go over. We usually meet each week but we put everything on hold for the holidays.
One of our biggest goals for this year is to reverse what I call the financial inertia of our money. Essentially, we want to stop paying interest and start earning interest. We are going to work on both goals at the same time during this year.
To slow down paying interest, we are going to pay off my student loan and the car loan. That will leave us with just a house loan which we will start paying extra payments toward. Every payment to principle lowers the amount of interest that you pay for the rest of the loan. I'll be talking more about this in the future.
To start getting more interest, we are going to do a few different things. I'll continue to put in the max amount that my company will match in my 401k. It's a percentage and I'll be getting a raise this week so that amount will go up. We are going to move most of our saving from our bank where it's earning a whopping .7% interest to ING where it will be getting 4.5%. We are going to start investing in mutual funds and stocks. I will also continue to play around with Prosper which probably won't make tons of money but I think it's valuable for now.
We reviewed our goals and changed a lot of the dates that we are aiming for. Most of the dates, we moved closer. For instance, we previously had that we wanted to be completely debt free by the year 2016. Last night in looking over everything, we decided that we could probably do it by 2010.
We reviewed our daily activities to remind ourselves of the small things that can be done daily that will help us. Every week, we pick one that we think is the most important to work on for the next week. This week we picked "Monitor Expenses Daily". We want to make sure that we get out of "holiday mode" right now.
We usually review our weekly spending next but we haven't been keeping track so there was nothing to review this week.
We looked at what's coming up in the next week as far as appointments go. I have a meeting with the HR director and my wife has a couple of appointments. Nothing financial but we keep track anyway so that we both know what's going on.
We have a miscellaneous notes section that we left blank this week.
Next is to list everything that we didn't get done from last week which was left empty because we didn't have a meeting last week.
The next section is things that we want to bring up next meeting. This is for things that wouldn't or can't be done in the next week and so won't be included in the "Weekly To Do" list. We left it blank last night but I remembered something today that we were going to do in January so I have added "Review FICO" to bring up in the next meeting.
The last section on the page is the weekly to do list. We put down that we will invest $100 and move our savings to ING. We also put down a couple of non-financial things down. We list everything for the week, again just so that we can stay on the same page.
When that was done, I shared a sketch of a floorplan for a house with my wife. I drew it last summer and we looked it over and made some small changes to it. We are going to be moving in a few years and will probably build a house. I'm drawing the house that we would like to live in. Whether we are in a position to build it or not is still up in the air but we have found that magical things can happen if you have a clear picture of what you want.