How My Husband and I Plan For The Year
You have heard it over and over again, what you don’t plan for won’t happen.
20 years ago when I was dating my (now) husband he sat across from me at the McDonald’s booth near the college we both attended and asked me what my 5 year goal was. I stared into his dark brown eyes and all I could think of was “married to you?” But I decided not to say that. I’m not even sure what nonsense came out of my mouth, but I had never really thought about it.
Fast forward to now. We have been married almost 19 years and over the past 10 years we have created a ritual of sitting down together each Fall and planning for the next year. Any time this comes up people always have lots of questions. I am thankful Lane agreed to do this video with me so we can share with you what we talk about. (THIS YouTube video will give go more into detail than this blog post.)
We keep these meeting notes in a folder in Evernote so we can both easily access them.
Here is an outline of what we discuss:
Finances
What were our financial goals last year?
Where are we at currently?
Where do we want to be at the end of next year?
What do we need to do to reach these goals?
Family
What were our family/couple goals last year?
Did we accomplish them and why or why not?
What are our goals for next year?
What do we need to do to accomplish these goals?
Home Projects
What did we want to accomplish last year?
Where are we currently at?
What do we want to do this year?
How much time and money will this take? When will we do this?
Personal Goals
What were they last year?
Did we accomplish them? Why or why not?
What are our goals for this next year?
What steps do we need to take to accomplish these?
Let’s break these down a little further:
Finances: We look at everything.
Where is retirement and savings currently at? Is it enough?
What is our current income for this year?
What can we do to raise our income?
Where is our money going? We use Quicken to track where our money goes. This is a great tool to get a monthly and annual snapshot of how we spend our money.
Family
We discuss vacations for the next year. When and how much do we need to save for this?
How often we will travel individually. We still have children at home and so we keep this to a minimal. We look at the calendar and see what is already planned and then create boundaries on what we add to that schedule so we don’t overcommit in the future.
We talk about what we are teaching our kids and what we should focus on.
We recap wins.
Home Projects
We added this category after we purchased a home.
There is never enough time or money to do what we want to get done, so we have to prioritize or nothing will be accomplished. This is also a great time to get on the same page and discuss what is important to us both.
Personal Goals
It’s so important to look back and see what our wins are from the goals we set the previous years.
If we didn’t accomplish a goal, is it still relevant?
We keep each other accountable throughout the year.
If you want to go a step further in keeping the goals in front of you, choose a date each month to meet and look over these. For us, it’s the first Monday of each month. We see where we are with our goals. We also look over our budget for the previous month and the current month during this time. We will go more in depth on that monthly meeting in a follow up video.
Make this fun! Set aside a date night - or a date day - to do this. Give yourself plenty of time and really talk through each piece of this with your spouse. Being on the same page as your spouse is always a good thing!