Milestones for 2021
As I did last year, I will try to aim for certain milestones on both a personal and financial level. I already looked ahead on what I want to achieve in 2021, so now it’s time to put those numbers into concrete SMART milestones.
Defining 2021
Well-defined milestones -preferably SMART– is the name of the game in 2021 as well. I was already Specific. I had the tools to Measure my milestones, and relevant is a given. Only Attainable and Time-based still aren’t quite there yet; I want to keep working on that for my 2021 milestones.
Attainable, attainable
Starting with the personal ones, I will set a reading target for myself once again. The same target at that. Following S.M.A.R.T. I will aim for attainable results. 4 remains possible. I already started with my Spanish and I’m currently busy with my second year, so that’s going well. My second personal goal will thus be a sporty one. I’m going to aim for an average of 15 km of running per week. I already run about once every week for about 5Km so increase that to 15Km is not that farfetched.
Regarding my financial targets, I want to set the three same ones: Savings Rate, Capital for personal portfolio, and dividend payout. Same amounts and all, though I’m not sure how realistic it’ll be given corona is still among us in 2021.
On top of the my financial and personal milestones, this year I also want to set a 8 blog goals, not neccesarily all metrics, but also improvements for my blog itself.
Financial milestones
My most important financial milestone: Savings Rate. Keeping a strong Savings Rate (SR) is paramount for a continuous growth of my net worth. In my look-ahead, I estimated an SR range of 35.5% to 53% with a stretched ambition of 75% at least twice this year. Given I reached an average SR just below 50% in 2020, my aim for this year remains 50%.
It’s clear from 2020 that I should be conservative because of living with two (soon 3!) on one salary and some savings. I don’t want to make the same mistake again.
Even though I thought 2020 was going to be challenging to reach my deposit goal I easily reached it thanks to the inheritance of my grandmother.
To make it more challenging for me in 2021, I will now aim for at least 20K EUR. Based on the calculations I made, it’s attainable. Since I already saved 25,000 EUR for my apartment as planned I can put everything I have left into my portfolio.
I wanted to reach at least 400 EUR in dividend payout last year but Corona made that impossible. With Lynx’ Portfolio Analyser I can see that I reached 328.19 EUR in dividends for all of 2020. The report also gives me a view of my Projected Income (see image to the right). Based on this, albeit incomplete, projection my 2021 target remains 400 EUR.
Personal milestones
As explained in my introduction, this year I’m going to strive to finish 4 economics or personal finance books. With the knowledge of last year, even this is still a lot. I managed to start in two books, but I failed to finish them. somehow I can never seem to finish them as I always find something else to do after an hour of reading. It then takes weeks to get back into reading, resulting in taking months to finish a chapter.
My second personal milestone is a sportive one this year. After registering and actually starting Spanish last year I have finally achieved a personal goal. I always had an eye on Spanish but I never got around to really starting it (besides trying a few apps from time to time). However, since my girlfriend is Spanish-speaking I just had to learn the language. I’m happy I did because I can really see her light up when I start speaking a bit of (broken) Spanish.
So, with that out of the way I now want to shift my focus to sports. Especially during corona it’s important to stay active. While group sports and the gym are not possible, there are always running or walking, and biking that you can do to remain active. And that is exactly what I’m going to do this year.
As someone who always loved doing sports, this past year was particularly hard for me, especially as I live in a small apartment with no room for gym equipment or a place to store my race bike (which is still at my parents). To motivate myself to stay active, I will aim for an average of 15 Km of running per week. I might do more, I might do less in any given week, but by the end of the year it should average out to 15 Km. Helping me with measurements, is my trusted Garmin Fenix 3 HR. Since we are already at the end of January I’ll already provide an update on this target in the coming weeks.
Blog milestones
As stated in the beginning, this year I will also add blogging milestones. Since there are 8 metrics that I wish to track in 2021, I put them in a clear table instead of highlighting them all individually like my personal and financial milestones. This table can also be found in my 2021 Look Ahead where detail more about why I aim for these numbers.
| Description/metric | 2020 result | 2021 target |
|---|---|---|
| Create a Logo | ||
| Write guest articles on other blogs | 1 | 5 |
| Have guest writers on my blogs | 0 | 5 |
| Pageviews | 132,876 | 200,000 |
| Average time on page | 1 m 40 s | 1 m 50 s |
| Bounce rate | 61.59% | 58% |
| Percent of Returning Users | 11.07% | 13% |
| Pages / session | 1.92 | 1.95 |
None of the above should be impossible, but since it’s the first time focussing on blogging metrics, I’m not sure how realistic they really are; time will tell if it’s realistic or not.
And there you have it, my new milestones for 2021. What do you think? Are they realistic? Too easy or too hard maybe?
Please leave a comment and share what you hope to achieve, bot financially and personally, this year.
Very inspiring! That’s a lot of visitors! I hope you will make your goal of 200.000 this year!