Living my best life in 2019 – Setting goals for the New Year

It is that glorious time of year when (some) people make resolutions about how they are going to change their life’s over the coming year. Often related to fitness, and often failed within the first few months, resolutions and goals are often unattainable.

There are many reasons people fail. Making large fundamental changes, such as starting to go to the gym 3 times a week when you currently never go, are just too hard to stick with. People also forget what their resolutions are. Without thinking about them regularly they can easily fall by the wayside and in particular they can seem a lot less important several months down the line.

This might be because your situation changes a few months into the New Year. Suddenly saving those few hundred pounds a month may no longer be possible. This is why it is important to make your goals flexible. Breaking it down monthly is still a good idea, but maybe plan to save a little bit more each month then you would have to in order to reach the goal for the year. For example if you wanted to save £1,200 over the year then maybe it is worth saving £110~£120 a month so that if one month you can’t save as much it doesn’t put the entire year in jeopardy. Being able to reach goals early also feels amazing!

Something else to avoid is picking resolutions that you simply fail time and time again to accomplish. I really want to learn more French but realistically it just isn’t happening in my life right now, despite making it a goal for the past few years. And you know what? That’s ok. Accept the things that aren’t going to happen so you can focus on the things that will happen.

Let’s talk about my goals for 2019!

Starting with my hobby goals let’s talk quickly about Warhammer (40,000 specifically). I haven’t had a chance to talk about this hobby yet but you can expect me to mention it a bit more as I become more involved in the hobby as a whole. My goals here are to have a fully painted terrain set, finishing painting my Tau army, and to sort out a gaming mat or board to play on. All of these things are easily achievable as long as I put aside some time to work on them.

Other hobby goals include practicing on the piano at least once a week. I really enjoy playing the piano but just often don’t get around to it for all sorts of reasons. I want to make an effort to put time aside each week to play. The last hobby goal is reading 6 books over the year. This should be doable and I want to read more. Originally I had opted for more books but decided to go with the realistic choice. I don’t want to aim too high and give up by the spring!

Moving on to lifestyle goals I have chosen three fundamental goals, two of which are ongoing with no set end. The first of these is to meditate at least twice weekly. Another activity which I enjoy and want to do but somehow never seem to get around to doing. I also want to walk to work at least twice a week. I work further from where I live than I used to so have gotten in to a habit of paying for public transportation which is bad for my bank balance and my waistline. Hopefully by walking at least twice a week I will be able to help myself in both these areas.

Speaking of my waistline, my third lifestyle goal is to get down to a 36” waist and weigh around 15 stone. I’ve been at this level around two years ago and I managed to maintain it for an entire year before the pounds started to creep back on. Ideally I want to lose this weight in time for my holiday in April so I’m going to be hitting it hard for the next 3 months and hopefully make some decent headway towards this goal. I’ll keep you updated on this on as time goes on.

Lastly we have my money goals for 2019. The holiday I am going on in April (for my anniversary and birthday) needs to be financed so one goal is to save for this and another is to have saved around £350 by the end of the year to go towards a 2020 holiday.

For the last several months I have been building up an emergency fund, for those just in case situations. Currently I save £50 a month (which is the minimum in order to receive the juicy interest rates) but I want to up this to £70 a month for 2019 in order to make sure it really is a nice sum I can rely on if the need should ever arise – which hopefully it won’t! Despite only being an extra £240 over the year I wanted to make sure that this goal was easily achievable. If I end up putting more than this into my emergency fund I certainly won’t cry about it.

In general savings I also want to build up £400 which I will be able to use in 2020 to help reach the goals for that year. Again not a massive figure but one I know I will be able to meet over the year without much hassle.

My final goal for 2019 is to find a full-time and well paid job. This will undoubtedly be the hardest goal of the year as it involves actual effort to achieve! That almost sounds silly but given my bad luck at finding new jobs I’d imagine I will need to put in a lot of hours to achieve this one. Admittedly, a lot of hours is not something I’m used to doing when job searching. Seems like the instant gratification life might not be a good thing after all? I want to put real effort into the job search this year and assuming I get a new job my other financial goals will be far easier as well.

Those are my goals for 2019. What are your goals and resolutions for 2019? Let me know in the comments below!

Thanks for reading and a Happy New Year to you!

Michael