I hate to admit it but since returning from our holiday I’ve been in a real slump……but now it’s time to lift myself out of it.  It’s time to refocus on my dreams.

I doubt that I’ll ever complete everything on my life list, but more than anything I hope that the Portugal one becomes a reality.

Completed in bold

Travel:

1. Visit Paris
2. Spend at least one month in Manhattan
3. Tour New England
4. Take Amtrak from Seattle to San Francisco (2015)
5. Visit Rome (June 2012)
6. Visit Vienna (2013)
7. Tour California
8. Visit Brighton
9. Visit Vancouver
10. Visit Washington DC
11. Visit Boston
12. Spend at least one month living in London
13. Visit St Petersburg
14. Visit Vegas
15. Visit Toronto

Financial:

1. Be mortgage free (2015)
2. Be debt free
3. Be Financially Independent by 2025 (and both able to retire)
4. Achieve Financial Freedom by 2020
5. Make a living online
6. Teach my kids enough so that they remain debt free (working on it!)
7. Have six figures in the bank

Personal:

1. Live in a foreign country – Portugal (2016)
2. Weigh 140lbs 150lbs
3. Holiday on a beach front property
4. Live near a beach
5. Speak fluent Portuguese
6. Design a house
7. Eat a 100% vegetarian diet for 1 month (June 2012)
8. Have a house good enough to holiday swap
9. Go to a Broadway play
10. Go to a West End play
11. Be a landlord
12. Sponsor one/two/three children
13. Take a cookery course
14. Attend the Super Bowl
15. Get a tattoo
16. Walk the Brooklyn Bridge
17. See the NY Jets play (2013)
18. Attend a baseball game (Yankees)
19. Take hubby on a surprise trip
20. Have breakfast at Balthazar NY

Places to visit:

1. Design Museum, London
2. Design Museum, Lisbon
3. The MOMA, NY
4. The MET, NY
5. The Guggenheim, NY
6. Coney Island, NY
7. The Space Needle, Seattle
8. The Grand Canyon
9. A Vegas casino
10. Niagara Falls, NY

Do you have a life list? if so, do you use it as a source of inspiration?

Life List Updated is a post from: Move to Portugal

Staying focused on this…

leads to this….

leads to living here…hopefully!

I’m feeling very under the weather today but wanted to blog, so I’m saying it with pictures. Further budget posts to follow

Focus is a post from: Move to Portugal

As we focus on reducing the mortgage as much as possible before we move to Portugal, I keep myself motivated and moving forward by setting monthly mini goals……some months I’ll set just a few, other months, a lot.

I’ll be honest and admit that I’ve not given a thought to any personal mini goals for May. My head is all on finances at the moment and the mortgage is becoming an obsession – whether that’s good or bad I don’t know?!

Anyway here are my financial goals for May;

• Keep our grocery spending below £180
• Reduce my personal spending below £50 (budget set at £80)
• Increase travel saving by £30+ – see above goal
• Overpay the mortgage by at least £1,457.66

May 2012 Mini Goals is a post from: Move to Portugal

Hello! We’re back from a very enjoyable ten days in New York. We lucked out with the weather (for the most part), and so were able to take in an enormous amount of the city on foot – the best way to view everything. I’ve uploaded a few pictures to my Flickr stream, here, I’m no photographer so please excuse the jaunty angles!!

Okay onto the reason for this post: our big three goals.  We have three main goals that are the basis for all of our goal setting and I wanted to do a small progress report on them.

1) Live in Portugal.  If you want to work in Portugal learning the language is essential, and not easy, but hubby is progressing brilliantly. He’s considered fluent by his teacher now, but he still feels like he needs further conversation practise and so he’s just signed up for a 6 week interim summer course which will be conversation based. After that he’ll continue with his lessons by doing the Portuguese A Level.  He’s also considering taking Spanish lessons as it’s not too difficult, once you know Portuguese. Apparently!  On holiday last week he had several conversations with a lady in our hotel – it was too funny as at first I didn’t realise he was speaking Spanish to her – the Spanish learning is to keep our options open.

2) To be (UK) mortgage free by December 2020 2017 (stretch goal – December 2015).  We’re being pretty aggressive with our mortgage this year and will continue to be until it’s paid off.  We hope to be mortgage free by the end of 2015 and then be able to rent out this house to cover the cost of renting in Portugal.

3) Achieve Financial Freedom by 2020. Perhaps the hardest goal of the three. Financial Freedom is different to Financial Independence (we’re a long way from FI), but paying off our mortgage will put us well on the way to Financial Freedom. I need to expand on the numbers needed for this goal in another post), but what we need to achieve [for this goal] sometimes blows my mind. However we’ll keep moving forward. Our passive income (savings and cash back) currently stands at £744 a year/£62 a month – a long way from our target!

Do you have priority goals? If so, what are they?

Our BIG Three! is a post from: Move to Portugal

April Mini Goals (Progress)

Financial:

• Contribute £500 to our travel fund – The transfer to our travel fund will go through next week
• Overpay the mortgage by at least £1457.66 – The mortgage over payment will go through on the 1st
• Keep our grocery spending within budget (£200) – Before we left for our holiday we’d spent £136.70 of our budget but we also left another £25 for any extra purchases the kids (!!) needed. Total spending so far: £161.70
• Make at least £300 above and beyond our regular income – On track. Made £200+ so far.
• Keep holiday spending below £1,000 – I’m hopeful of making this goal although we did spend a lot in the first few days!

Personal:

• Read at least 2 books – Read My Heart Wanders by Pia Jane Bijerk and halfway through Julie and Julie and The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
• Watch at least 3 films – Yes. Watched: Mission Impossible 3, The Debt, New Years Day, Contagion and 2012 (avoid if you can!)
• Complete at least 3 life list  goals – Yes! Yay! So far in New York we’ve been to the Guggenheim Museum, a baseball game (The Yankees), which I loved, and had breakfast at Balthazar. Yummy.

We’ve really been enjoying every minute of this holiday, and being able to do things that I’ve looked forward to doing for a long time makes it even better. It’s very hard to explain but I feel ‘at home’ in New York and more relaxed than I feel anywhere else.

How are your goals progressing this month?

April 2012 Mini Goals (Mid Month Update) is a post from: Move to Portugal