My 5 Money Goals for 2021
It’s that time of the year where everyone is setting new goals for themselves. All the finance/money youtubers are posting videos about how they’re planning on spending 1% of their enormous income and saving/investing the other 99% of it. That’s not hard to do when you have a lot of money coming in every month. Here’s my version of this but from the perspective of someone who is a fulltime student working part-time. For some reason, I spent my whole life thinking I couldn’t really save money or be financially disciplined while being a student. Countless podcasts and Youtube videos later, I realized this is definitely not the case. Below I share a list of the money goals I am setting for myself for 2021:
- Have a fully funded emergency fund
My emergency fund is currently 50% funded and has 2500$ in it. Since I’m still living at home and don’t have to worry about living expenses, I decided I want to have 5000$ in my emergency fund. I hope to accomplish this by the end of January 2021 as I’m spending most of my holiday break picking up extra shifts.
2. Reduce my cost of livng and actively stay out of debt
I’m going into this new year with months of budgeting experience and an (almost) fully funded emergency fund. I have month’s worth of data that I can analyze to make cuts in areas where I’m overpseding (ahem Tim Horton’s coffee every morning) and I should be able to cover any surprise expenses without going into debt. In previous years, I had a few hundred dollars in my chequing account and credit cards to hold me over for emergencies. Nope. Not in 2021. I am done with those reckless days!
3. Keep working on my credit score
My credit score is finally at a “good” place — a whole 715. By continuing to make all my payments on time, this number should continue going up this year.
4. Scale my side hustle to have 1000$ a month in extra income
I recently started an instagram business and as with any online businesses, the overhead cost is close to nothing. My goal is to scale it to bring in an extra 1000$ a month. Whatever profits I make from this will be split between re-investing to grow the business and towards maxing out my TFSA for the year (the limit for 2021 is 6000$).
5. Buy my first investment property
By following through on all these goals, I should be in a position to buy my first investment property by summer 2021. I will finally have saved up the capital to purchase a condo and have a good enough credit score for this to pan out. I can then rent this property out to create additional cash flow for myself.
Maybe in a December 2021 I can come back and write about how this worked out. Wishing you all happy holidays and a happy New Year!
