Setting Intentions

I’m not very good at goals. I was thinking. maybe my goal for 2023 should be to get better at articulating goals and then checking in on my progress with them. So my goal for this year would be… to get better at goals?

Blerg.

The good news is there isn’t a lot about my life I’d like to work on. That is a positive! There was a time when I would spend this part of the year lamenting how much weight I’d gained, and devising strategies to lose it. But this year I’m not worried about that. I have definitely gained some weight, but as long as my clothes still fit I’m refusing to get on the scale to see exactly how much I’ve gained. I think, in the absence of old Halloween candy and holiday treats, I’ll stabilize again.

I do want to test for my blue belt before summer, but I have a community at the dojo to help me with that goal.

Professionally I have no goals right now, which strikes a part of me as sad, but not a very big part of me. I’m trying to embrace the general satisfaction I feel at work, and to not think too much about my lack of ambition.

I guess the one thing I want to get better at is planning, in my personal life. I am VERY good at planning at work – sitting down with my teaching planner is one of the ways I calm myself when things feel especially hectic. I always have a general idea of what I’m going to do for the coming month (in each class) and every Thursday and Friday I spend time writing out detailed lessons for the next week.

But my personal life is not like that. I do use a personal planner now (this is the second school year I’ve used it) and it definitely helps, but I’m not taking full advantage of it. It even has a space at the top of every month and each week to articulate goals, and reflect on what I did well and what I could work on, but I only sometimes fill those parts out. I’m just not very good at long term planning in my personal life. I kind of let external forces drive a lot of timelines (like I start thinking about summer in early March, so I am ready for the Rec and Park summer camp sign up on the second or third Saturday), which works well enough but doesn’t provide much satisfaction.

When my kids were younger, these systems (or lack thereof) worked well enough. We couldn’t do much with them, travel wise, and we mostly just looked for camps that would help them kill the summer hours. And then the pandemic happened, right when that would have changed. And now they are older and suddenly everything seems to need more forethought.

Maybe my goal should be to meet with my husband once a month to talk about what is coming up and decide who will do what. Maybe that change would be enough.

I also want to get my kids into the habit of doing their chores without so much reminding. Focusing on that would be provide dividends that would compound naturally.

And of course there is money. I always want to get better with my money, because the truth is I’m not intentional about it at all. I don’t think I would say I’m bad with money, but I believe I’ve gotten this far without ever paying interest on a credit card because of privilege and luck (just another way to say privilege in this context), and really nothing else. But I don’t want to teach that mindset around money to my kids. And we’re finally at a place financially, where it’s clear that if I were more intentional with my spending, it could really make a difference.

We have big trips we want to take with the kids in the next few years, trips that right now feel prohibitively expensive. But I don’t think they have to be, if we plan for them. So far our international travel has been geared toward affordability, but as the kids get older and we can count on one hand the number of summers are daughter will reliably be home, I’m realizing that if I want to take them to Hong Kong (where I grew up) or Japan (where they want to go) or Australia (on everyone’s bucket list) or Spain, we’re going to have to have WAY more money saved.

Camps are also much more expensive, and not just because Rec and Park opens priority registration to kids in need early, which leaves almost no spots for middle class families in mid-March. My kids actually want to try new things at camp, like baseball and basketball for our son and art for our daughter. And those kinds of camps are $600+/week, instead of the $200/wk we were spending before the pandemic. Even if my kids just do four weeks of camp each, that is a $3.5K+ price tag! If we want to go to St. Louis AND anywhere else, we’re talking $10K+ a summer (much more if we manage a big international trip).

We also have to rent a car in St. Louis now, which means that trip costs an extra $1K. And my daughter wants to try a week of sleep-away camp, which will be three times more than a week of day camp. It all adds up.

Again, we have the means to do a lot of what we want, but only if we’re spending intentionally.

I’ve already talked to my husband about setting up monthly meetings, where we can have a couple drinks and review our spending. The good news is my husband doesn’t spend much, so I could make big changes without his participation. The bad news is, that means it primarily falls on me.

So I guess that will be my main goal: intentional spending. Which hopefully will lead, eventually, to financial intelligence. I’m (re)reading Your Money or Your Life (which I bought year(s?!) ago and never finished), which should help. The thing is I’m not the kind of person who wants to buy a car every few years, or dreams of upgrading her house (we joke we’ll stay in this one until they wheel us to the assisted living center two blocks away). We don’t even splurge on vacations (you may remember we only went to Hawaii this summer because we had a(n almost) free place to stay and the airfare and car rental were incredibly cheap).

So many of the examples of unnecessary indulgence in the book don’t apply to us, but we absolutely have too much stuff. And it was my credit card that purchased most of it. Those relatively small purchases add up. I know that being more discerning with my spending would make a difference, possibly a really large one.

And now I have actual financial goals to work toward. I never felt a particular draw to FIRE, and we’ve always been so fortunate to be able to live within our means (at least since our son left childcare, that has been relatively easy). I do stress some about college (okay a lot) but that feels like such a giant price tag that daily decisions couldn’t really touch it (of course they could, but it never felt like that enough for me). So now that I have actual vacations I want to be ready for, I think foregoing little daily doses of consumer pick-me-ups will be easier to forego.

It seems like meeting with my husband once a month is the first step. We could talk them about spending (and I’d have that meeting to hold me accountable), and how the kids’ chores are doing, and the general state of our lives.