New year, new me!!! - said everyone ever 🙃 … But no really, this is the year. This is THE year. My whole life has waited for this moment - or maybe I’m just finally mentally ready (or ever-so-slightly matured) to start taking better control of my finances. I admit that most of my life (aka my entire life) I was never the most fiscally responsible. I wasn’t proud of my spending habits and was intimidated by all the personal finance jargon, like “401k”, “investments”, etc. As a result, being an ignorant potato was bliss.

However, in this past year, I’ve really sparked an interest in growing my wealth, both actively (save / make more money) and passively (make my saved money work for me). I don’t want to start penny pinching and saving all my nickles and dimes, but I do want to start spending more consciously. I plan to supplement all this by studying more on personal finance through books and blogs and tracking my journey. This is how The Conscious Potato was birthed … just right before the start of a new decade. Below are my goals for 2020. LET’S GOOO!! ✌️

TRACK MY NET WORTH

Starting off with a fully loaded goal right here. It actually is composed of 2 parts:

Track monthly expenses: In order to best increase my savings (and ultimately build my net worth), I need to start by monitoring my spending habits to pinpoint and cut on expenses that don’t bring me satisfaction
Track monthly net worth: Cause what’s all this for if I don’t get to watch this beautiful data point grow

Click here to check out our free tools page if you’d like to use our spreadsheet to calculate your net worth.

INCREASE SAVINGS RATE

Since I haven’t historically tracked my savings rate, I’ll use the 50/30/20 budget rule as a starting baseline goal. This rule recommends putting 20% of your take-home income into savings.

The 50/30/20 budget rule also suggests 30% of your take-home income can be spent on wants / fun money. My goal is to try and limit this to 25%. We’ll find out if that is achievable.

PUT MY MONEY TO WORK

I have had many lost opportunities to make more money with my current savings by parking it all in my Chase bank savings account. There are so many options to invest the cash - either through high yield savings accounts, stock picks, index funds, real estate, etc. etc. etc — too many options that resulted in analysis paralysis. This year, my goal is to leave a portion of emergency funds in my bank, but invest the remaining cash elsewhere.

LEARN MORE ABOUT BLOGGING AND KEEP UP WITH IT

I’d like to use this blog to stay accountable and use it to keep track of my financial journey progress and document / share what I learn in hopes that it can help anyone else out there who is looking to get a better understanding on improving their financial health.