Happy 2023! I hope that your 2022 wrapped up well, that you were able to find some down time to rest and relax and that you are fired up for a great 2023! As with many of us, I did make some resolutions in 2022 and in an attempt to make them happen, I a) wrote them down (here’s my blog post from January 2022) and b) did a mid-year check-in (here’s that blog post). To put a bow on them, I am sitting down to do one final check-in to see how they all turned out!

Grow net worth by 25% – FAIL

I’m a big believer in forward progress and have been tracking my overall net worth on a month by month basis for a few years now. In 2018, our net worth grew by 7%, 10% in 2019, 25% in 2020 and 28% in 2021. Amazing! This is partly a combo of us contributing 30% of my salary automatically to my 401(k) and my Employer Stock Purchase Program (ESPP), accumulating equity in our house and then saving some beyond that! On top of that our investments (stock market and rental property) are appreciating on their own which is still just so cool to me. So, in 2022 I set another goal of growing our net worth by 25%.

How did it go? Not well! We ended the year DOWN 6%, i.e. we had 6% less money than when we started. So I’m not beating myself up too much here – the overall stock market took a beating, especially in the tech sector where I have some of my money (i.e. through my ESPP). VTI, the Vanguard Index Fund where I put most of my money is down 21% for the year. Property values slipped quite a bit too – our primary residence (according to Zillow so grain of salt there) is down 5%. Crypto (thank goodness I didn’t have too much there) is down like 50%. Most things are down!

All in all I think we did the right things – I mean yes early 2022 was scary but I didn’t go into cash then and I don’t regret it. Early 2020 was scary too and look how that turned out from a stock market perspective (very well). I’m not retiring tomorrow and I’ve decided I’m not in the business of timing the market so I stuck with it and keep dollar cost averaging via my 401(k) each month. So this is a bummer but that’s how the market does – it doesn’t always go up! It has some up years and some down years!

Purchase 2 rental houses – 75% met

What a hustle this was. Real estate was absolutely nuts in 2021 and the first half of 2022. Especially being an investor vs. looking to buy a primary residence where I felt people were willing to spend more since it was going to be their everyday house. We probably looked at 100 houses (yes looked), put offers down on 25, went under contact on 5 and FINALLY bought 1! Honestly it felt like a diamond in the rough and we found a good one. It still took some work but we got it rented and are happy with how things have turned out!

So that’s the first house, the second house I will call it a 0.5 house – it’s technically just a piece of land that we in 2023 plan to build a house on. Looking back during COVID it feels like everyone had their ‘COVID purchase’ – i.e. something big that you splurged on. For us, we took a trip with some neighbors to a tiny house community in Tennessee. We fell in love with it and when the opportunity arose to purchase a tiny house lot in one of the newer neighborhoods arose, we jumped on it. It was a bit crazy – we bought in site unseen all virtual (it was COVID after all) but we finally got up there a few months ago and it’s a beauty! In 2023 we plan on getting the build process started – which will in and of itself be a whole new adventure!

Save for winter in the summer (including daycare) – 75% met

In years past, I had a bad habit of not saving for the winter months until the winter months and that always proved to be stressful in the winter months. Whether it’s the holidays (birthdays, Christmas, New Years) or all the bills that come due (i.e. annual HOA), end of year donations we like to make or all the shopping and shiny new things that come with the winter season, things get expensive. Money just seems to fly out the door a bit quicker. So, in the beginning of 2022 I set a goal to better save for the winter – including daycare. I do this unnecessarily confusing thing in my budget where I reconcile daycare towards the back half of the year.

So the good news is that we saved well for winter, including daycare – or so I thought. We actually finished most of our Christmas shopping in early December and things were looking ok! We had set a nice cushion aside and we were feeling good! Then actual Christmas hit and all the travel expenses and just general expenses of seeing family, getting meals, coffees, fun treats etc really added up! For daycare we had set aside 85% of the 2022 bill – so still short of where we needed to be but much better than last year!

It is what it is at this point and I’m so glad we did better than last year but that last little bump of spending was quite the bummer!

Make sure I’m maxing out retirement – MET!

Woohoo! Finally a resolution I was able to keep. The max you can contribute to a 401k in 2022 is $20,500 and I hit that goal! I contribute a significant portion of my each paycheck (15%) to my 401k and little by little it added up and I hit the max! I hit it before the end of the year, which was a nice bonus that actually helped us save more for the winter in the fall – since I hit the cap my paycheck actually went ‘up’ since that 15% wasn’t able to go to any more retirement. In theory I could have pared my contributions back and had gotten more money throughout the year but it ended up working out well to have a little bit larger of paychecks in the fall!

Help Mrs. Money launch her business – MET!

Mrs. Money has successful launched and is running her business as a postpartum life coach! Over the summer she went part-time at her school and spent half her day on her business. It’s been a lot slower getting up to speed than either of us had hoped but we’re making it work!

Focus – MET!

I’m super thrilled with this one – I set a word of the year each year and in 2022 my word was FOCUS. I wrote about it extensively in this article but here’s the TLDR:

– I am not superman and cannot do everything
– I took time to figure out what was important to me in 2022 and how I wanted to spend my time
– I leveraged a framework of: Sustain, Grow and Moonshot to help me focus my time and energy
– Wrapping 2022 I: sustained my personal finance blog, bought 1.5 rental houses and did a deep dive into carbon sequestration using seaweed

It was a great exercise for me and I saw a ton of benefits both in my personal and professional life. I figured out what was important to me and prioritized where I wanted to spend my time and I said ‘no’ to a lot of things so that I could say ‘yes’ to my goals!

2022 proved to be a great year and although I didn’t meet all my personal finance resolutions, I met several of them, and made good progress on the rest!