Your 2023 Financial Goals

1) Stay happily married (divorce will wreck your net worth a lot quicker than any recession)
2) stay the course regarding maxing retirement
3) only check 401k balance quarterly (avoid the pain of the drop in value)

Hope that the timing of my putting cash back into the market is correct.

Hope SAVA gets approval for the Alzheimer's population and my YACHT hopes.

Buy a second property.

I looked for a thread like this in 2022, but I couldn't find one.

I did find a end of year summary for 2021 financial goals. It was interesting to look back and see where our heads were 12/2021.

2023 financial goals
1) make more money than 2022 (sales)
2) net worth over $1.25M (~20%growth)
3) get closer to maxing out all tax advantaged opportunities. I have college students now and it is more difficult than prior years.

Now that I am experiencing kids leaving the home, I have been more active in finding events to spend time with the family (music festivals, sporting events, motorcycle trips, etc..).
I am less focused than past years on getting every dollar possible to work for me. But so far, I am good with the tradeoff.

Good luck to everybody

1. Pad the savings account, we had some expenses over the past two months that brought down our cash reserves.

2. Save between 15-20% of our pretax income in 401K/Roths.

3. Stop some of the stupid spending that I'm prone to do from time to time. Nothing major, but little things add up.

1. Max out retirement account
2. Max out iBond purchases
3. Buy small mulifamily property once prices crash far enough
4. Move to a no income tax state
5. Put more money in taxable brokerage account (amount tbd)
6. Earn more work income than 2022
7. Get third party advice/input on financial strategy
8. Listen to personal finance and real estate podcasts and audiobooks
9. Buy more T Bills

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Now that I am experiencing kids leaving the home, I have been more active in finding events to spend time with the family (music festivals, sporting events, motorcycle trips, etc..).

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This!

Been on family 'events' for a while, with a large % of budget towards live music, Mardi Gras, sporting events, etc. Not big travel, as have found the little things are the big things most of the time.

However, in 2023, we are going bigger on family travel. Planning to visit 2 countries we have not been to before and a pretty cool vacation in US.

Here is the process I’m finalizing.
1) All income into single checking account
2) Pay all bills from that checkings (on auto pay)
3) Establish target checking account balance
4) Utilize rule that automatically moves excess cash (above the target account balance) from checkings into taxable brokerage
5) Set rule in taxable brokerage to automatically purchase index funds every two weeks based on portfolio design

If the dollar amounts of the rules are set up correctly, then I won’t have to make any manual adjustments. This becomes a fully automated system for take home income that sort of behaves like a 401K.

I’m a big believer in “process” and removing friction from financial operations. For me, manually buying shares has been a hindrance and this approach solves it.

This article gives you some more information on the automated brokerage. LINK

Schwab, Fidelity, and Vanguard all offer iterations of the automatic investment. It’s worth noting that this is different than the roboadvisors that they also offer. Robos is a different service but is tangentially related in purpose it serves.

The general “catch” is this automated investing approach described in the link is it only works with mutual funds but not ETFs or individual stocks. Reason for this is its structured to transact at the end of the day at NAV of the fund rather than account for volatility of share prices changing throughout the day. Of course they could offer a service that said “buy at 10:00AM on every Thursday for $X of XYZ” but none of them provide that service today (or not that I am aware of).

I spent a good amount of time understanding our free cash flow so that I can design rules that accomplish the steps. A ballooning checking account is just a cash drag so the rules need to be the right withdrawal amounts or it isn’t hands off.