My Debt Goals: no moving the goal posts please!

Reading through more and more PF blogs I’m starting to see something frequently which they have that I don’t – Goals. I think set goals are an essential part of seeing improvements and changes. You can’t blindly work your way to being better without knowing where you want to go, right?
So… what should my goals be? Do I need to have short term goals or just long term/annual goals?
Ultimately my goals are to pay off our debts, but that will take more than 12 months. Especially with the wedding in November!

So, after a bit of thought, my goals are:

2009: Pay for my wedding and accrue no debt. Based on my wedding budget, I will nominate $29,310 as my wedding savings goal. I will be doing this via credit cards, as I mentioned in an earlier post, but I will be closely tracking to make sure that I make repayments PLUS pay the wedding savings onto there. I will only spend on wedding related items. I will NOT carry a credit card with me unless I am going to pay for a wedding item! I will track this goal upwards regardless of what I spend on the wedding.

2009: Get our debt under $290,000 by the end of the year. This means paying off $10,000 in debt and also paying for the wedding as per above goal. (Note, our home loan interest will mean that only $5000 of the $24,700 worth of repayments will actually go towards debt reduction. The other $5000 will be off credit card debts and my car.)

2009: Start an emergency fund, and have it at $1000 by the end of the year.

2010: Go to Europe without having to borrow money or accrue additional debt. This means saving approx $20k between November 2009 and August 2010, as we want to do to Europe in September. This means the same saving that we’re in now for the wedding as it’s about the same amount of money in the same amount of time.

2010: Pay off my car in full by end of year

2010: Pay off another $5000 off credit card debt.

Okay, I have 3 shortish term goals (i.e. this year) and 3 longish term goals (i.e end of next year). I reserve the right to review these goals at any time lol but I don’t think I will. I like the idea of being debt free, and it is in the back of my mind constantly… how good would that feel!

P.S And my non-PF goal is to go down a pants size. I’m currently at 71.2 kg and wearing size 14 pants. I found a couple of kg over Christmas and haven’t been very good at losing them again. This goal couldn’t be a number i.e. 5kgs because now that I’ve taken up Personal Training I suspect I may gain some muscle…. That’s the plan, anyway!!!