One of our goals in the last 5 years has been to have no debt and build assets like a house, car, and a small business. We have been blessed that we have achieved all of those with some careful planning and more importantly, focused execution.
We enjoy setting family goals since that helps us all strive to achieve them together.
Some of our family goals for 2013 are to have a big-ish 5th birthday party for our daughter Manini in March, travel to Goa for a holiday {seriously, have planned it every year for the last 5 years but have never been there!}, and redecorate Manini’s room by the end of next year.
We’ve estimated that we will need to save INR 1, 50,000 or about $3000 to accomplish all of these goals.
As always, we do not want to touch our saving corpus for any of these aspirations so we’ve decided to achieve these goals by finding simple yet effective and often times, innovative ways over the next 12 months to create a ‘Meet-the-Family-Goals Fund’ which would finance these aspirations.
Not only that, we’ve tied these goals to another family ‘goal’ which is to lead a healthier, wealthier and a happier life.
So, **drumroll** on November 1st this year we kickstart this endeavour and in the process achieve these three family goals.
Our Goal for November 2012 is to save an estimated $300 or 15,000 INR by living a healthier and simpler life.
Here’s how we propose to achieve it or our bare-bones action plan:
- Make November a ‘No Pizza’ month.
- Eating out 1-2 times in the month instead of the usual 3-4 times.
- Eat through our pantry and save on grocery bills.
- Wine/Scotch only on Sundays and not the usual Saturday & Sunday.
- No visits to the movie theatre. We watch a movie or two every month and figure can easily give this up.
- No visits to Dunkin Donuts. Seriously, we need to stop heading there for weekend treats!
We’ve estimated we’ll save approximately $350 or 17,500 INR by sticking to our action plan for November and achieve all three of our family goals by October 2013.
I will be back next month to share with you our progress as we follow {or not!} to our action items in our journey to a healthier, wealthier and happier life.
Will you be setting any family goals for 2013?
My mother and I just had a conversation about the expense of pizza – both at a pizza restaurant and the take-and-bake kind. I’ve been making my own pizza for years and it is delicious, easy and cheap. Admittedly, I now have a bread machine to mix the dough so that’s a big time saver, but prior to my bread machine days, I often made the crust with baking powder biscuit dough rather than yeast bread dough. Anyway, I make a tasty and inexpensive sauce from a small can of tomato paste, seasonings and a little water to make it the right consistency. Then I use whatever I have on hand for toppings and we have pizza for pennies per slice. And when the grandkids are here, I let them each make their own – fun for me and fun for them!
Crystal recently posted..Are You Cheerful or Gloomy?
Crystal, that sounds so much fun and home made pizza’s and bread’s are not just inexpensive but also so much healthier.
Hope you have super weekend
Now that you’ve mentioned it, I think I probably should…
Thanks for sharing!
Cham Cuartero recently posted..FOR KEEPS By Aaron Paul Lazar: A BOOK REVIEW & CONTEST TIME!
Glad you liked the post Cham.
Do share with us the goals that you set!
Have a wonderful weekend
Family goals are so wonderful because everyone feels like they are working together. Our current goal is coming to a close— pay for my husband’s current degree (MDiv) and remain debt-free. He graduates in May! Woot! He will do a PhD next, so that is our next big financial goal!
Johanna Hanson recently posted..A Simple Fall Wardrobe {And how I use Pinterest to determine my style}
Hi Johanna,
That’s awesome. Congratulations
Family goals also create joint accountability which makes it much easier to pursue.
Wishing your husband all the luck with his PhD!
Mayank.