Goodbye 2015 and Hello 2016! Happy New Year everyone! Welcome to my 2016 financial goals post. As I do every year, I’ve been thinking about how we fared this past year in terms of our financial goals and about where I’d like us to be in 2016.
Last year, I laid out 6 financial goals. So let’s see how I fared.
1. Net Worth goal of $725k. My first goal was to achieve $725k in net worth by the end of 2015. Initially, I thought this was a rather modest goal but with expensive home renovations, the purchase of a rental property and a really tough year for financial investments, it proved to be quite the challenge! I was very pleased that we exceeded this goal coming in at nearly $745k.
2. Pay $30k off my home mortgage. We didn’t even come close to meeting this goal. By making our regular, weekly mortgage payments we managed to pay down a little over $12k on our principal. The main reason was that our home renos ended up costing a lot more than we anticipated.
3. Make $7,500 in passive dividend income. I’m happy to say that we made over $8,200 in passive investment income in 2015. Despite having taken on a lot of debt, I still made saving and investing a priority and it showed as my monthly dividend income reports illustrate.
4. Max out RRSPs. I managed to max out my RRSP for 2015 but we didn’t contribute anything to my wife’s as she took a mat leave.
5. Max out TFSAs. We came close to meeting this goal but fell short. I was about 3k away from filling mine and I managed to transfer $30k of non-registered investments into my wife’s, but was unable to completely max hers out.
6. Max out RESPs. This we did achieve.
The main reason we fell short of our 2015 goals was the home renos that we did to fix up our new home. There’s no question that 2015 was one of the most difficult years for us, financially, as I can remember.
On the bright side, the big renos are complete, our home is as energy efficient as it’s going to get, and we don’t have to worry about any more updating for a very long time. We also bought our first rental property and did some updates on it as well.
Given all we’ve done in 2015, I feel that we’re well positioned for 2016. So here are our financial goals for 2016:
- Pay off HELOC – our main focus for the first half of 2016 will be to pay off approximately $50k that’s on our HELOC. We used it to buy our rental property and for our home renos. I’m a little uncomfortable carrying that much debt outside of a mortgage so it will be the big priority.
- Grow our net worth beyond the 800k mark. Paying off the HELOC will be a big help in that regard. Hopefully our finances will be firing on all cylinders this year and we’ll make it.
- Max out RESPs.
- Max out my RRSP and resume $500/month contributions to my wife’s.
- Transfer more of our non-registered investments into our TFSAs.
- Pay at least $10k off our mortgage principal with lump sum payments.
- Grow our Passive Income to over 10k!
Those are our 2016 financial goals. Do you have any financial goals or resolutions for 2016?