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So why the blog? I spend so much of my free time, and a lot of my not-so-free time, thinking about how I can get to where I want to go. When I was younger, it was about how to get rich quick, but I haven't seen anything that really works. And now I'm about accelerating traditional approaches to get there quicker. Not overnight, but not 30 years either. Now that I'm on this quest, sharing ideas and getting feedback seemed like a good idea on how to broaden my scope, learn from others, and generate new ideas.
One of the first things I want to do is create of financial goals for 2007. I haven't refined them yet, but pretty much they will be along the lines of:
- Staying out of consumer debt. Shouldn't be hard to do since I've been conditioning myself on that habit for quite a while now.
- Stop collecting stuff. I used to be pretty bad about accumalating crap because I was "collecting" books and CDs, but now I need to completely stop and focus on getting rid of the crap.
- Accelerate mortgage payments. I know this goes against a lot of conventional wisdom as many financial planners advocate having a mortgage for tax reasons. But with an 5 year ARM that will be coming up in a few years, I want to reduce the principal as much as I can so that when I do a refi, it is a lot smaller in order to keep my payments about the same of what they are.
- Diversify my portfolio. Although my retirement account is well diversified, my brokerage account is not. I know this has been a bad move as most of my holdings have been in my company's stock plan, but the stock is recovering as of late and I'll sell some in 2007 in get into different sectors. I'm thinking about health care as I've been reading in places that it has been undervalued and I'm over-exposed in tech.
- Disciplined trading. Even though I should know better about being emotionally involved in a trade, I still let myself get trapped. Hopefully this is the year I'll get better at it.
Only 5 goals for now, but I'm sure I'll come up with 5 more before the year begins.
