My 2016 Financial and Blogging Goals

    With 2015 having come to a close and having achieved a good portion of the 2015 goals I had set aside for myself, it is now time to look towards the future! Once again this year I want to challenge myself to save more of my money each month through controlling my spending, while setting clear goals for investments, dividend income and also now branching out to diversify my overall investment portfolio.
  
    For the goals I am setting myself this year, I have distinguished them into two categories; Financial and Blog related goals. Primarily I focus on the financial goals through saving, investing and deploying capital. While the blog related goals are about my financial journey which I share here with everyone.


2016 Financial Goals
1) Build portfolio projected yearly dividend income to 2300.
2) Receive $2,000 in dividend income.
3) Contribute at least $8,000 to my TFSA.
4) Achieve a savings rate of 40%.
5) Open an RRSP, probably with $US.

    My financial goals are fairly straight forward. By the end of the year I want increase my yearly estimated dividend income from my current $1671.86 to 2300, and increase of about $630. As well as receiving $2,000 in dividends, which would be about $330 more than my current project dividends will provide me. That last goal may be a bit difficult depending on when dividends are paid out, however goals should be at least a bit challenging.

     My third goal of contributing $8,000 to my TFSA is how I plan on achieving the previous two goals. I'v based that amount on my projected monthly income, which is not a perfect estimating of income due the 'newness' of my current job and not a lot of history of my pay to base my income on. Along those same lines, I decided to try again my 2015 savings rate goal of saving 40% of my income. Last year I had set myself that goal on the optimism of keeping my expenses down, which I did quite well (saved 29%), but also on getting a higher paying job, which I know have! So I am setting that goal again to prove to myself that I am able to save 40% of my income now, and then challenge myself further in 2017!

    Lastly, while the TFSA is an amazing savings vehicle I also want to open up a Registered Retirement Savings Plan. Most likely with this account I will have it as a US dollar savings account to diversify my Canadian stock portfolio with some American companies and/or ETF's. Quite likely this will be part of my jobs automatic savings plan, where a portion of contributions are matched.


2016 Blog Goals
1) Consistently post my: Watchlists, Income & Expenses, Dividend Income and Portfolio Updates.
2) Post 1 Review or Informational post per quarter.
3) Earn 3500 page views in a month.
4) 36,000 page views by year end (3000avg).
5) Earn $200 in Adsense revenue.

    For my blog goals I am mainly focusing on continuing to consistently record my investing journey and sharing my thoughts, ideas and views on investing and finance related topics. With consistent content I hope to continue building my blogs viewership and hit new highs for page views. Currently this December had my highest views in a month with 2,247 and ended 2015 with ~16,000 views. Besides posting more, I also mentioned in my 2015 Goal Review that I want to be more active in the financial blogging community, posting more on my readers blogs and contributing to you, which should help to also draw in new readers here. 

    Recently, since my blog has been eligible for Adsense, I have been tinkering with it a bit and at long last just passed the $100 threshold for a payout from Google and am looking forward to getting that. From there, I would like to double that amount to $200 for 2016, but that is fairly out of my control.

    So, those are my Financial and Blogging goals for 2016. What do you think? Will I be able to make them, or are they perhaps too easy? Do you have any similarly ambitious goals that you set for yourself this year?