Our 2018 Goals Update

It’s been a hot minute since I did a goals update post, so I thought I would share with you on where we’re at with our goals and well, just life stuff. 🙂

We finally have gutters again!

Seriously, we haven’t had gutters on our home since we got the new roof put on in March. It’s crazy how much water runs off our home – it would sometimes look like a waterfall coming off the front of our home! But now we have new gutters and gutter-guards (which make my husband happy so he doesn’t have to clean them all the time) and so rainy days will be a little less noisy and a little more peaceful. 

We got a heck of a deal on our gutters because the guy that owns the company hooked us up since my husband has been throwing him thousands of dollars worth of work. So, I can’t share the number of how much it costs us because I agreed with my husband that I would respect the awesome deal they gave us (since this isn’t a deal they’d more than likely offer others). But I’ll tell you that it over 60% LESS than what we were planning on it to be!

It’s crazy to think, but our summer is almost over. Seriously, we’ve got one month of summer left before school starts (the first day is August 1st). Our summer has been crazy busy so far – my brother’s wedding, our Tybee Island annual family vacation, VBS at our church, and of course trying to catch up with visiting family and friends. 

Ignore the fact that our grass really needed to be cut in this photo…

We also registered one of our kiddos to play soccer in the fall…even though kids sports are INSANELY expensive, we ended up finding a very reasonably priced soccer program through a local church. So, our sweet Collin is going to be playing soccer – he loves playing soccer with Daddy (former All-State Champion Soccer player himself) so we’ll see how it goes when he’s playing on a team.

It’s the first time that our boys are going to be doing two separate things. They’re Irish Twins so they usually do everything together. 

To recap what we’ve achieved so far this year on our goals:

✔ New Windows

✔ New Roof

✔ New Gutters & Gutter Guards

✔ Newly Re-modeled Front Proch (this was a little un-planned. The front porch steps had to be replaced because they were rotten but the remodel was a wild hair up my husband’s you know what. Head here for the post about his project fund.)

✔ Paid Cash for My Husband’s “New” Truck

✔ Paid Cash for Our Brand New Boat Motor (this was all my hubby – he worked crazy hours and pulled in side money from everywhere to make this happen! He’s amazing)

Here’s what we still need to do:

• Replace a few pieces of siding on our home that are rotten or damaged.
• Paint the entire house.
• Bust up the sidewalk leading to the front porch and repour sidewalk. 
• Landscaping like crazy…
• Repair our TV (this is new…our two-year-old decided to “clean” the TV while mommy was in the shower and well, needless to say, she broke it. We’re going to try to have it repaired so we don’t have to replace it. Side note: we only have one TV in our home.)
• We still need to max out my IRA contributions this year…we’re about $2,000 from that so we’ll see.
• We still need to have about $7,000 to go meet our goal of paying off $10,000 on our mortgage this year. 😭

Some of the best books I’ve read so far (since the last update)

The little book of Hygge

The Secrets of Happy Families

One Beautiful Dream (so, so, so good mamas!)

You Need a Budget

You Can Stay Home with Your Kids

Surprised by Joy (I really LOVED this one!)

This year has been super awesome so far! Some of the highlights so far:

• I’m now a writer with Go Banking Rates – see my latest article here.
• I was named one of the Top 50 Women in Personal Finance
• It’s been 5 years since we had a credit card! 👏
• I got to be part of an awesome Organization Conference (check out the details here)
• Our middle child graduated from preschool, so this new school year we’ll have 2 kids in big school!
• I haven’t purchased any books with our money this year (I have bought 2 books with gift cards that I received for my birthday, but I haven’t spent any of our money so it’s a miracle!)!
• I got to meet Jennifer Fulwiler and hear her speak at our church (oh, it was so good!)
• We’ve done super awesome this year with sticking to our grocery budget!

Okay so you tell me, how are your 2018 goals going? Successes, failures, blunders, I wanna know!

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