This weekend I spent a little time going through our expenses for last year, after having calculated our net worth for January 1. I’m not planning to reveal all our numbers here–Mr. Physician in Numbers (despite his suggesting the blog name) doesn’t want our numbers revealed on the Internet. But I will say, overall, we did pretty well in 2019.
We spent a little less than the year before, almost entirely due to reducing spending on travel. Our net worth went up ridiculously, almost entirely due to the stock market, over whose performance I have absolutely no control.
My New Year’s financial tasks completed, it seems fitting that I formulate some goals for 2020.
I haven’t really done this much in the past few years, except for declaring war on the mortgage, which is now defeated. So coming up with appropriate goals is a little challenging.
I decided to break up my goals for 2020 into 3 parts.
Hope for the best
The goal here is to live a long and healthy life, which will need to be funded by savings. If we do well enough, this will mean retiring before age 67. Or at least cutting back; maybe I will enjoy being an old crotchety doctor-professor, but in that case, I will work because I want to, not because I need to.
Therefore, these plans all have to do with saving money to fund the future.
- I decided we could put aside more money out of each paycheck, so I increased the automatic withdrawal to the super secret savings account. The ultimate goal for this money will be investing in the taxable brokerage account. However, since I’m not 100% sure what my take home paycheck will be right now, I will wait a month or two to ensure we are not saving too much.
- It’s time to set up and fund a Backdoor Roth IRA for Mr. Physician in Numbers. If we do this right, he will have a lovely coffee fund in retirement. Since I didn’t get to this before the end of 2019, we have 2 years to fund: 2019 and 2020. The deadline to get the 2019 contribution done is April 15, per IRS rules, so I think we have a clear deadline for this.
- I should also get my Backdoor Roth IRA funded. Since I arranged my contribution for 2019 already, I have all year (and into April 2021) to manage this for 2020, but I would prefer to set this up soon.
Plan for the worst
This isn’t such a pleasant topic to discuss, but I really owe Mr. Physician in Numbers a backup plan in case something happens to me. If I croak, we have insurance and a will in place. But if I am still here–just unable to manage all our financial tasks–he might have a hard time managing our finances.
These plans should help address the problem, should it arise (I sure hope not!).
- I am going to ask Mr. Physician in Numbers to manage the bills next month. I want to make sure he knows what bills we have, how we get them, how we pay them.
- Hopefully, after this experiment, we will have an instruction sheet with accounts and passwords set up. In case he needs to use them. My job will be to make sure this is complete, and hidden away where he can find them (but no one else can).
- Once I get this done, I hope that most household financial details will be addressed. If I am not confident I have this all arranged, I may look into the In Case of Emergency binder, which is apparently on sale this week (not an affiliate link). I don’t know if I will purchase it this week and fill it out, but I think I do need to complete it–or something like it–going forward. My Dad’s illness scared me, and clearly if I am delirious, Mr. PiN will need a guidebook on managing the finances in those few short hours per day that he isn’t by my hospital bed.
Live for today
All this talk of saving money and preparing for disaster is ever so responsible of me, but it doesn’t sound like very much fun.
My goal is to retire comfortably, probably before age 67. That doesn’t mean I need to keep my head down and go without the whole time. I think planning to spend some money now to make life better is a reasonable goal as well.
Herewith are some planned expenditures for the year, which I think we can afford and ought to make happen.
- Travel. This is going to be a bigger year than last year. We have 4 trips tentatively planned: a CME meeting, a family celebration, and 2 vacations (1 in driving range, 1 international). We may just have to pay cash for everything, but my goal is to see how far we can stretch our travel rewards/frequent flyer miles/etc. to save money.
- Electronics. For the past several years, I have been encouraging Mr. Physician in Numbers to update his phone (it’s over 10 years old, with the battery life of a mayfly!). I think 2020 will have to be the year, finally, that we take care of this. We may look into MNVOs for him.
- Home projects. There are a few projects around the house that I would like to address in 2020: putting in some overhead lights, fixing some wood trim, possibly replacing carpeting. I don’t know if we will manage all of these (I have no idea what these might cost), but I figure this is the time to list them as goals. Or maybe wishes.
I’ll be curious to see how many of these actually get done this year. I suspect that if I get some managed, there will be periodic updates. If not, I will check in next year.
How about you? Any big financial goals this year?