Several media outlets report that people give up on new year’s resolutions by as early as mid-January. It’s the second Friday of January according to Best Life. Forbes is more optimistic but still mid-February!
One of my favorite hacks for sticking to new year’s resolutions is setting monthly goals instead of annual (hat tip to educator Miho Kubagawa for introducing me to that one!). If you make 12 monthly mini-resolutions instead of a sweeping proclamation that will take a year, you’ve potentially outlined baby steps to the big resolution anyway, and you can notch some quick wins along the way.
If commitment in general is a sticking point, you’re only on the hook for 30 days at a time. You also can experiment within a related theme to find different tactics or focus on specific areas.
Examples of monthly resolutions
Improve your health could become 30 days each of:
- Trying new sports/ classes/ routines
- Doing a split
- Working up to X push-ups, pull-ups or other strength marker
- Starting each day with cardio
- Going to bed each day on time
- Eating at least one fruit and vegetable daily
- Drinking eight glasses of water
- Reading articles/ blogs on nutrition
- Walking X number of steps
- Meditating or journaling every day
- Eliminating caffeinated drinks or processed food or red meat…
- Keeping a food diary
Improve your finances could be 30 days of:
- Keeping a spending diary
- Learning about your full benefits (insurance, retirement, perks)
- Placing a moratorium on spending
- Performing small acts of charity
- Adding extra dollars to existing debt payments
- Launching a side business
- Reading articles/ blogs on investing
- Clearing out your clutter to donate or sell
- Eating in and finally using everything up in your pantry
- Organizing financial statements and other records
- Practicing negotiation skills
- Learning a new area of finance (e.g., NFT, Defi, Metaverse land grab…)
My 2022 month-by-month list is blank
I haven’t set up any resolutions, annual or monthly, and I’m holding off. I signed up for a 300-day habit-building program (it’s called Optimize, and they have a slimmed-down but still substantial free version). My plan is to jump wholeheartedly into the program and just use that for the structure and support. My overall priority is health and wellness, and the program already pays a lot of attention to exercise, nutrition and sleep, so I’m covered. I have tried in the past to set up specific fitness goals and failed miserably. Time to do something different!
Another key priority is figuring out what activities to focus on, given that our initial plan for the immediate empty-nest years — long, slow travel – has been tabled for now. This is a continuation of this year and turning 50, and I expect that I’ll have much more to report in 2022. Our priority is still lifestyle-first work as play, so we’ll put location-independent, flexible projects first.
Finally, we’ll have significant rebalancing to do early in 2022 with a private loan coming due and a property sale imminent around the same time. It’s an opportunity for us to do something different with our portfolio than the real estate and paper investing we’re doing now. We have written before about alternative investments we have considered. Two additional investments that have come up are creative ventures: 1) a friend of mine is raising money for a movie with some interesting names attached; 2) another friend is raising for an off-Broadway play with big-name backers already attached.
Both of these are speculative investments from a purely numbers perspective. However, they would be amazing learning experiences, networking opportunities and a potential entry into other deals – you don’t get a chance to invest in Hamilton right away! In this way, decisions to go in on creative projects such as these are more business considerations than straight-out investment decisions.
I slowed down at the end of the year to gear up for a fast start to 2022
We’ll need to make decisions about contributing to the movie and/or play, as well as rebalancing our portfolio in general in Q1 2022, and ideally January.
At the end of the year, I was focused on slowing down to enjoy the holidays with the expectation it will set me up for what is always the busiest quarter of the year. The 300-day program I entered started this week on Jan. 3.
What about you? Do you set monthly or annual new year’s resolutions or none at all?
We are Scott and Caroline, 50-somethings who spent the first 20+ years of our adult lives in New York City, working traditional careers and raising 2 kids. We left full-time work in our mid-40’s for location-independent, part-time consulting projects and real estate investing, in order to create a more flexible and travel-centric lifestyle. 
Financial independence and early retirement is not something we originally focused on, but over time realized it was possible. Our free report, 
