2019: The Year of the Side Hustle

Emily Firebird Finance

7 years ago

I can’t believe that it’s already the first day of 2019. Wow that went by fast. Let’s see how we did with our goals from last year and what we’re looking to accomplish this year.

Kayla’s 2018 Goals

One of Kayla’s resolutions for 2018 was to try 1 new recipe per week, equaling 52 new recipes per week. How did she do? She absolutely CRUSHED it. We actually stopped tracking all of her new recipes once she hit 50 in late March. We have had so many delicious meals this year. The fact that she is such a good cook makes going out to eat harder. Why pay $30 for something that I know my wife can make at home? Sure, there are some nights when she doesn’t feel like cooking and that’s really when I will step in and cook, minus the 1 night where we got Thai food because no one wanted to cook. Overall, Kayla not only crushed her goal, but she helps us get to our financial goals by saving on eating meals out.

My 2018 Goals

One of my resolutions for 2018 involves this blog. I’m going to go ahead and call this goal a fail. I started the year strong, but had a hard time keeping up once we got busy with the new home and various responsibilities. I have recently returned to this blog and will be devoting a lot more time to improve both its content and overall quality.

Another 2018 goal I had was focused on my side hustle as a krav maga (self defense) instructor. This was both a good year for me as an instructor and also, not so great a year through no one else’s fault than my own of course.

On the plus side, I was able to get a couple of private lessons under my belt, earned my next level of certification, gathered a lot of data to revamp my women’s seminar to better the experience and takeaways for the participants and have increased the number of classes that I taught over last year’s numbers.

On the down side, the private lessons I did receive didn’t turn into any regularly paying clients, nor did I finalize my revamped seminar and marketing strategy for it.

Luckily, while I didn’t reach my full potential on this area of my life, progress was made and I look forward to making even more progress this year. Remember, making new year’s goals/resolutions isn’t to beat yourself up on them if you do not succeed, but to take the lessons you learned in trying and take them with you as you progress into the next year, month, week or day.

Our 2018 Goals

In terms of our joint goals, most of them financial, we knocked it out of the park. Here’s a quick list to show you everything we accomplished this year:

Bought our first rental property.
Got our first tenants.
Paid off CC debt from move and huge bill from fixing our home’s main drain line.
Net worth goal of $170,000- We had reached over $190,000 before the markets started their downturn this past couple of months, but we’re still over $170K!
Used CC points to pay for our upcoming trip for a friend’s wedding in March of 2019.
Began the process to move my Roth IRA away from the financial adviser who has been charging me 1.76%– this will be in Vanguard at an expense ratio of .05% by the end of Jan next year.

Overall, we did really well in terms of our finances and implementing little changes like the one minute rule, which basically means “if you can get it done in one minute or less, just do it now.” The two of these things combined have increased our financial security and ability to get things done in our home. Now let’s see what we can do this year with all the time and financial security we have freed up last year!