2013 Financial Goals

I've already admitted that I didn't track my spending well at all in 2012.  I have no idea how much money I ended up spending on groceries, clothes, or anything else for that matter.  I did track pretty well on Christmas, birthday and other special occasions, but I just have a fairly close grand total, not individual.  This year, I only plan on tracking groceries closely.  I figure I need to start slow so I will stick with it better. :)

What I do know about my spending last year is that it included several big, expensive expenditures.  For instance, we bought my husband a 1998 Toyota Tacoma in the fall.  We also spent about $4000 on a basement remodel (ripped out walls, put up new ones, replaced some old wiring, replaced the ceiling, etc), that we finally finished in November.  Then there was the new sleep number bed we bought in October, and paid almost $2500 for, by the time it was all said and done.  Add in a trip to Missouri, and a road trip to Washington (including stops in Spokane, Seattle, and right on the coast), and it was an expensive year.
I'm proud to say, that although we didn't make as much progress on our debt repayment as we had planned, we did make SOME progress.  We ended the year with about 6% less debt than when we started.  We also have a larger retirement fund, emergency fund, short term savings account, vacation fund, etc. 

In 2013, we plan on paying at least one of our cars completely off (hopefully both, but the second might not happen until January or February next year), taking a big vacation to Florida, getting rid of one of the last debts besides the house, and building up our retirement fund more.  We automatically pay a certain percentage of my husband's check into his retirement, but we had fallen behind on putting money away in my account since I stopped working.  Now we are working on fixing that situation.

We are also hoping to start saving in earnest for another newer car.  My minivan is still running great, but it has over 100K on it now, and since we do cross country trips regularly, we will want to replace it as soon as it starts showing any signs of problems.  My husband would actually prefer to replace the Impala with a daily driver for me with great gas mileage first, so we will see.  A smaller, better gas mileage car would be significantly cheaper, but not something we could travel in, so we would have to keep the Uplander in great shape for that to work.