SMART Goal Setting: Two Mini Goals Make a House

Good day friends!

I’m back with the second installment of my SMARTing series. Today I’m talking about my big goal of buying a house and the two mini goals I’m creating to get Leon and myself financially secure enough to buy a house.

This is going to be kind of a long one, so grab some coffee. Or grab a drink and we’ll turn this isn’t a drinking game. Drink every time you read the word “goal.” I promise you’ll end up drunk by the end of this post.

SMART Goal Setting: Two Mini Goals Make a House

If you read the first post on the basics, you already understand the process of setting SMART goals. (Drink!) If you haven’t read the first post, I would suggest going back and starting there. Setting SMART goals isn’t rocket science, but a little extra pre-preparation never hurt anyone.

So for the sake of re-Secreting: my goal is to buy a house in the next 12-18 months. To do that Leon and I need to pay down some debt – mostly student loans – to improve our debt to income ratio (which I’ll be referring to as debt:income from now on) and save as much as possible to use as a down payment.

Step one: tackling debt.

Leon and I are not going to pay all our debt off before buying a house. College is expensive and we’re not suddenly making six figures each, so making that goal would be unRealistic. Instead, we’re making the goal of paying off our two smallest loans and putting a dent in the other two.

Below is the layout of our SMART goal.

(Caveat: I’m not going to share the real dollar amounts of our goals/debt. Your debt and goals are different from mine; so knowing mine will only serve to feed your voyeuristic nature. Also, fake numbers make for easier math.)

Specific: Pay down $15,000 in debt.

Meaningful: Aggressively paying down debt will improve our debit:income and get us one step closer to our house.

Measurable: Dollars are very measurable. And the spreadsheet with specific monthly dollar amounts for each loan is also very measurable.

Action-oriented: We have $8000 in savings, so once we take out $2000 to use as an emergency fund, we’re plopping $6000 directly into debt. That will be our payment for the first month and leave us with $9,000 to pay down. From there we’re going to put $825 towards debt for the remaining 11 months. This will cover more than the minimum monthly payments and we’ll make the payments in a Dave Ramsey Snowball fashion. (That link is to an explanation of Ramsey’s Debt Snowball.)

$6000+($825*11)=$15,075

Yes, I realize that this is more than our goal, but I like easy numbers. So instead of paying $818.19 per month, we’re paying $825. An extra $75 won’t kill us, though.

Realistic: We built a strict, but doable budget. We built a little wiggle room for fun into our budget, plus we have that emergency fund to cover unexpected expenses.

Timely: We are giving ourselves 12 months to do this and we will be able to check in each month. I even made an awesome spreadsheet to hang on the fridge and every time we make a payment as planned we get to put a sticker on the spreadsheet.

Step two: saving as much as humanly possible.

This goal isn’t quite as set in stone as our debt goal. This goal represents the bare minimum since more savings is definitely a good thing, whereas we figured out that there isn’t much benefit to paying down more debt at the expense of our savings.

Specific: Save at least $16,000.

Meaningful and measurable: The amount that we save directly impacts the amount we can pay for a house, since we want to put a large percentage down. So this is a hugely meaningful goal. And again, dollars and my nerdy spreadsheets are immensely measurable.

Action-oriented: Our budget has allowed for $2250 per month to be put towards debt and savings, so with our debt plan in place we’ll have $1425 per month to put into savings. We’re going to start this goal a month after we start our debt goal so that we have money for all those fun moving expenses, so we’ll have 11 months to get to our goal.

$1425*11=$15,675

This still leaves a $325 gap, but I’m anticipating with birthday money and wedding gifts and Christmas bonuses and picking up change off the street, we’ll be able to make up that gap and then some.

Realistic: This amount is just a hair below being difficult. So $16,000 is without a doubt obtainable. Like I said before, though, this amount is the bare minimum.

Timely: Our plan for this mini goal runs for 12 months. Since our over-arching house buying goal gives us 12-18 months to buy a house, if we find that after 12 months we want to build up more of a down payment we’ll continue the same debt and savings plan for another 6 months.

Okay! Those are my mini goals. They are not exactly fun, because living with a super tight budget is pretty much never fun. They definitely don’t guarantee that we’ll be successful in buying a house, but we still stand a significantly better chance if we can stick to these goals (or at least in very close proximity to these goals). And that makes it worth it to me!

If you read all the way through to this point you are amazing. And if you were playing the drinking game version you are very drunk, because I said “goal” 23 times. Either way, thank you!

Cheers, Kara

Here's Some Great News

Hello my most wonderful friends!

I am in a beyond fantastic mood today! So many great things are happening and I want to share the happiness. I’m pushing the very educational SMART goals post I had written to tomorrow and instead sharing with you a random assortment of great news and fun pictures and other things to make you smile.

Here’s this tweet:

I checked and that URL does actually re-direct you to Trump’s Wikipedia page. This is both a wonderful idea and factually accurate.

Here’s a selfie I took the other day:

When I sent it to a friend she said that I looked remarkably more put together than usual. I said, “that’s what you get with a face full of makeup and bad lighting.” Clearly, my friends are very nice to me.

Here’s some great news:

Leon and I finally have a house to move into! After weeks of driving to Raleigh every other day and looking at so many houses, we put in an application and got approved. Now we have a move-in date and I feel like we can stop living in limbo.

Here’s some more great news:

I have a second interview tomorrow. I am being cautiously optimistic about this job. A career counselor once told me that on average a person has to interview for six jobs before getting an offer, and this will be my fourth job interview. And while I know that I am seriously impressive and far advanced in everything I do (just ask my mom), I would be way ahead of the curve if I actually get this job. But even still, I’m being cautiously optimistic.

Here’s my lunch:

The power unexpectedly went out last night, so Leon and I had to go out to dinner, and these are the leftovers. There are few things that I love more than leftover Mexican food. 

Here’s a succulent:

I am notoriously bad at keeping houseplants alive. I could show you some half-dead cacti that would make you very sad. But I have kept this little baby alive since my friend’s bridal shower back in the fall, and that makes me very proud.

That’s all the great, amazing news I have for the day. I am so happy and giddy and I am definitely dancing around the house to Meghan Trainor (my newest guilty pleasure). And let me tell you, my dance moves are show stopping!

Share some great news and funny things with me, friends. Let’s keep these good feelings going!

Cheers, Kara

Secreting, Sort Of

TGIF friends!

For a lot of you, this is a three-day weekend, which means today is either going to fly by or everything is going to blow up. I really hope it’s the former.

So I’ve got something a little heavy to talk about for a Friday, but if it’s too heavy for you now, come back and read it come Tuesday. (Or come back and re-read it on Tuesday anyway, because I love pageviews.)

I’ve never read The Secret, but I know people who did. I think the gist of it – the big Secret – is that if you put what you want out into the world the power of the universe and the power within yourself will make it happen. I have no clue if this works, but let’s give it a try.

My goal (which Leon is happily joining in on) is to buy a house within the next 12-18 months.

This is a lofty goal. It’s scary and feels very adult. But it’s also a goal that I am thrilled to death about for two big reasons.

First, it involves making a big, long-range financial plan with lots of SMART (Specific, Meaningful/Measureable, Action-oriented, Realistic, Timely) goals. I am a little bit of a personal finance nerd, so I’ve excited to put some of my knowledge to work and to learn more.

I’m going to use a lot of the information and resources from one of my favorite blogs, Our Freaking Budget, along with some Suze Orman and Dave Ramsey books to make our plan. The first step is having a very honest (read: scary) conversation about Leon and my financial situations.

Second, it involves making something beautiful, because Leon and I are planning on buying an ugly, old house.

Wood paneling? Oh baby!

Shag carpet? Yes, please! And make it maroon.

Laminate countertops and pastel bathroom tiles? That’s what I’m talking about!

I know a little bit about fixing up a house from growing up in my mom’s house, which we nicknamed “the structural nightmare.” Leon knows a lot more about fixing up a house, because he did that for work for a while. Between the two of us we are capable of doing a good bit of the work ourselves, and I know enough to know when I need to hire someone. (We’ll see if Leon has that self-awareness.)

The idea of taking an ugly, old house that would normally get overlooked and investing our money, time, and energy into turning it into something beautiful that not only looks like us, but that feels like our home is the most amazing thing. I’m not delusional to think that fixing up a house ourselves will be anything like what you see on HGTV. We’re not the Property Brothers or Nicole Curtis. It’ll take a few years and we’ll be living in a construction zone for a good bit of it. It’ll be a huge financial investment not just for this next year, but for a long time after that as we invest in fixing it up and paying off our mortgage.

This goal is scary like a rollercoaster. (I don’t like rollercoasters, but it’s a good simile.) But everything I’m doing right now – moving, trying to find a job, getting married – is scaring the shit out of me. So while I’m already scared, let’s go ahead and add one more thing.

Tell me, friends: am I completely bonkers? If you have any advice, send it my way.

Cheers, Kara

12 Events of House Hunting

Hello friends.

So here’s what is going on in my head: I love patterns. We all do. I know that I’m not the only person that arranges M&Ms in a pattern by color before eating them, right? Oh, I am? Whatever. You’re lying.

Anyway, an upside to my love of patterns is that patterns make for good blogging. Patterns make things fun to read! And because, after years of writing a daily healthy living blog (now defunct), I still think in terms of blog posts, all I could think yesterday as I drove home from an awful day of house hunting in Raleigh was how I could turn everything that happened to me into a “12 Days of Christmas” themed blog post.

Let’s ignore the fact that it’s January.

So here is my "12 Events of House Hunting" song. I highly suggest you sing this out loud. Highly.

On this Monday of house hunting Raleigh gave to me…

ONE guy peeing on his car at a gas station.

TWO “aggressive breeds” that I have no qualms about lying about to get a house.

THREE house showings scheduled.

FOUR times I cried in my car.

FIVE times I told myself to pull it together.

SIX hours of driving.

SEVEN rooms, including the fenced in back yard, is all I’m looking for.

EIGHT dollars spent on a bottle of wine as soon as I got home.

NINE minutes notice the second real estate agent gave me that pets aren’t allowed, “so do you even want to see the house anymore?”

TEN percent battery to get to the third house and then home.

ELEVEN wrong turns.

TWELVE hundred dollars apparently gets you a two bathroom, one bath condo with no yard and appliances from the last century.

These two "aggressive breeds" are aggressively lazy.

I fully realize that I’m being a drama queen about this whole house-hunting thing and that these lines don’t really match the tune of the song. Hopefully you’ll forgive me these two indiscretions.

On a very related note, can anyone recommend a book I can read or beads I can carry or oils I can smell that will help me with my control issues? It’s getting a little ridiculous.

Cheers, Kara.