Goals 2021 Update 2

I am writing this post a little bit early so I won't quite have reached all the sub-goals I had planned for the halfway point.  There's also the little point of a trip to Lundy Island for our joint birthdays and anniversary celebrations, and that obviously would have taken a bit of a chunk out of our finances.  That being said, we're still doing pretty good and I'm feeling quite proud of where we are at the moment.  

The main goal for this year was to work towards becoming more financially fit and free, and I'm happy to say we're definitely on our way to that.  Our individual emergency funds are still there looking good and the credit cards remaining at zero.

Now that we've had a few months of paying bills we've been able to work out how much we would need to save to cover all our outgoing for four months and this would be £5200 (which we had round up to because, let's face it, it's always better to be over) and after a long discussion about it have decided that we are happy with just having four months covered rather than the six we had thought about at the start of the year.  This is one area we have definitely done well in, managing to get to the halfway point by the end of May.  This gives us seven months to make up the final £2600.  I'm not going to lie, I'm feeling very proud of us for that.

Last time I wrote about this year's goals I had had to miss a month's pension payment which meant that I needed to up my payments to £225 a month to ensure that I would catch up by the end of the year.  My sub-goal for halfway through the year was to have put away £1200 towards my pension, but by the end of June it'll only be £1100.  However, this is only £100 out after missing a months payment, so I'm not feeling too bad about it.  It is definitely now a financial priority for me for the rest of this year.  

We've managed to put money aside every month for our Christmas and car repair sinking funds as planned.  My sub-goals for five months were to have saved £325 towards the Christmas fund and £225 towards the car repairs and we've hit those targets.  There have been a few hiccups here and there, but I think we've done pretty well.  We could probably have done a lot better if we'd been a lot stricter with our spending, mostly on food we didn't really need.  However, as we are still managing to reach our financial goals for the year I'm not going to worry about it too much as we do want to still enjoy ourselves as well.

As for the skating, well let's just skim over that.  I've been concentrating on too many other things to make this goal a priority right now and this was always going to be a goal that was really more about having a little bit of fun more than anything else.  However, it's still something to aim for over the next six months.  Maybe I need to make the goal a little more concrete rather than just that I'd like to be able to stay upright on it before the year it out.