So it has taken a couple of weeks into the start of 2020, but we’re finally ready to decide on what it is our goals for the year will be.
As we mentioned in the last post, we are in fact expecting a child in a few months time and with that comes all sorts of new challenges financial and otherwise. Mrs. FIC will be taking a pay cut of about 50% as she switches over to her maternity leave, our renters are moving out of our basement suite and we’re not in a hurry to replace them until after we settle in with the new one so there will be some new stresses put on our budget.
The good news? We feel we’ve set ourselves up to handle these new challenges. We won’t have quite the same disposable income that we’ve had until now, but for added comfort around the home it’s a fair trade.
Here are some of our financial goals for 2020 given this new information:
1 – Max out TFSA’s
This is going to be a main priority for us both this year, we’re already fairly close to max’ing our TFSA’s out prior to the start of the year but we each just gained $6,000 in fresh contribution room to start 2020 so this goal will reflect roughly $16,000 invested between us both.
2 – Max out my RRSP’s
Another thing we feel we should be doing this year is max’ing out my RRSP account. Since our income won’t be as high this year as the past few years we might not get quite the same benefit as we could had we waited to do this but for the sake of a couple thousand dollars – maybe, it’s probably better off just sticking with the plan and investing steadily to get this thing filled up. This will likely reflect another roughly $16,000-$18,000 dollars in freshly invested funds.
3 – Increase our Net Worth by $50,000
For those of you who tuned in to our net worth update just a couple of days ago, you’ll know that we’ve started off 2020 with a net worth of approximately $305,000 give or take. We don’t expect to have the same luck in the markets this year that 2019 brought us but even still we would really love to bump this number up to $350,000 by years end and we feel that is an ambitious yet attainable number for us.
4 – Receive $8,000 in Dividends
This one is hopefully the most sure thing of the entire list, right now we’re projected to get over $7,000 for the year so this means that we need to drive that dividend income up by a little under $1,000. If we get money invested early enough into the year this should be reached quite easily – we hope.
5 – Get projected 12 mo. income up to $9k
This is different from number 4 in that this number reflects our outlook for 2021 mores than 2020. To reach number 4 we’ll have to get roughly $20k invested receiving 5% dividends on average but also have that money invested in time to actually receive those dividends in the 2020 calendar year.
For the $9k projection this means that we’ve invested nearly $40,000 throughout 2020 with an average yield of close to 5%. Attainable – but we’ll have to be focused.
6 – Try out WealthSimple Trade
This is one for fun. We joined WealthSimple Trade back when it was in Beta, but have yet to actually link a bank account to it or make any purchases with it yet.
For those who don’t know, this platform gives you free trades on stocks and ETF’s (there are currency costs if you buy in USD or foreign currencies though) and we think that our Canadian cash account would be a good fit to try using this platform.
We’ve mentioned the tax advantages for Canadian eligible dividends many times in the past so we won’t get into that here but once the TFSA’s and RRSP’s are full we will be starting to contribute to this account and buying purely our favourite Canadian dividend payers while also feeding our curiosity about this new platform.
There you have it, those are the goals for Mr. and Mrs. FIC for 2020!
Questions? Comments? Leave them below or at:
Instagram: @FindependenceCanada
And we’ll be sure to get back to you.
Thanks for stopping by,
FIC.