In the spirit of writing down my financial goals for the year, I’m serving up a steaming helping of savings objectives for 2015.
It’s taken me a while to nail down what I want to accomplish this year. After taking eight months last year to pay off all my debt, I scrambled to figure out what would come next. Do I save for a baller vacay? Or maybe the newest iWatch? Nah. My free-spending (and overspending) ways have been mostly kiboshed, and I now live leanly while I build my freelance income.
I spent a fair amount of disposable income making my big move from Vancouver to Toronto at the end of the year, and now that I’m a bit more settled into full-time freelancing, I’ve got some big ideas as to what I want to work toward financially.
Top Up My Emergency Fund
According to personal finance gospel, you should have around three to six month’s worth of expenses stashed away just in case your world implodes (or your car kicks the bucket, or lose your job). After punching some numbers into my fancy calculator, I figured six months of expenses totals to just under $8,000 (I rounded up so it’d be a prettier number).
I managed to save a significant portion of this number while paying down my debt, but I want to top this up for peace of mind.
Current: $5,500
Goal: $8,000 by the end of 2015
Save For a New Laptop
I’m currently running on an ancient Macbook that was purchased circa 2008. Yes, one of the white ones with the plastic casing. It’s dirty, the casing is cracking and splintering off and runs slower than molasses despite me only using basic programs like Word and surfing the ole Interwebz. Needless to say, this old girl just ain’t what she used to be.
While it has served me well, it’s time to get serious about getting a new laptop. I’m a hard-core Mac convert (snivel if you must — I’ve had awful luck with PCs), so I’m budgeting $1,000 to scoop up one of the new Macbook Airs. This is a pretty short-term goal, as the situation has gotten fairly dire and I need a functioning laptop to do my work. I’m expecting to buy this baby in the next month, so my extra pennies are mostly going toward this fund at the moment.
Current: $500
Goal: $1,100 in 30 days
Secret Savings Fund
I’m currently starting to stash some extra cash toward a goal I’m not ready to reveal yet, but I’ve set a total of $6,000. No, I am NOT pregnant.
Considering the timeline, this is by far my most ambitious goal. But I think we’ll be able to manage.
Goal: $6,000 in about 6 months
Whoo! Get it, girl 🙂 Those are some great goals. Will be rooting for you to hit your new laptop goal in 30 days — I know how frustrating it is to try and work on a machine that has given up.