My Financial Goals for 2020

It’s Goal Setting Season aka SZN!

I’ve never really been one of those people that writes out goals for the year. I’m usually a go-with-the-flow type of person where I envision what I want my life to be and then work at making it happen. Saying that out loud now does sound kinda weird considering I’m definitely the type to have 5, 10 and 20 year plans but…I never have them written out. I have just always thought them and changed the parameters as life happened. I want that to change that now. I want to be more intentional and explicit about my goals, the yearly ones at least.

I’ll share a few of my financial and personal goals on the blog. And pray that sending my words into the chasm of cyberspace will keep me accountable to them. I really want to make it happen. I think I’ve gone a little easy on myself but I also don’t want to be unrealistic so we’ll only change them if I think I could do better. I’m one of those people that rather exceeds my goals than fall considerably short.

Enough chattering, then. Here are my financial goals for 2020!

Complete the 53 Week Challenge in 2 Currencies

I attempted the challenge last year, and I want to take it up a notch this year. The main reason for this is that I want to save this money but separate of my other financial goals. Last year I used it to pay for some of my land purchase, but now I want to purchase land AND save this money. I’ve already put up a post about the 53 Week Challenge for 2020 and plan to save simultaneously in 2000 UGX increments as well as an increment of 5 for the currency I get paid in.

Purchase (at least) one plot of land

I purchased my first ever plot in Uganda in 2019, and it was much harder than I thought it would be. I am very grateful that I worked with a reputable land owner that the family knew and my parent was actively involved on my behalf helping out with land inspections and delivering payments. I finished the payment and got the sale finalised as per the terms. All I’m left with is doing the final official title transfer to my name. I wanted to take a break and not to buy any land in 2020 but there are some plans I can’t keep postponing any longer and they involve buying large property and my goal is to start purchasing for that in 2020. I plan to buy at least an acre of continuous land in a location I visited in 2019 while I was in Uganda.

Break even and earn income from one new business

There’s this business idea I have been thinking about for quite some time. A friend encouraged (put out an ultimatum) me to get working on it and I started laying down the structures late 2019 and we did a soft launch in November. It will officially launch in January 2020 and start selling. Based on my estimates and the nature of the business, I should be able to break even by the end of 1st Quarter. My goal is to break even and earn an income from it that I can divide between adding stock and bolstering my sources of income.

Have 3 months of my expenses saved in my emergency fund

I  have talked extensively about having an emergency fund on the blog including breaking it down into Steps 1 to 3. I also talked about how I didn’t complete Step 3 last year  because I diverted the money into buying land. I want to complete Step 3 in 2020. I will use my average monthly expenditure from all 12 months of tracking my expenses in 2019 and come up with a figure for what 3 months ought to be. I haven’t yet decided whether I will use my savings from the 53 week challenge to fund my emergency fund or save some more out of my salary. I’ll decide this sometime later in the year based on how my income situation pans out.