Since starting AnotherLoonie back in 2020, I’ve taken inspiration from others in the personal finance blogosphere and began posting my New Year’s resolutions to help with goal setting and keeping myself accountable.

It’s sort of become a tradition, and for better or worse, it’s been a great exercise to reflect on the successes and failures over the past year.

If you’d like to check out my previous New Year’s resolutions, find them at the following links:

• My 2021 New Year’s Resolutions
• My 2022 New Year’s Resolutions

Reviewing my 2022 Resolutions

Last year I made 6 pretty ambitious New Year’s resolutions. Unlike in 2021, many of these resolutions were personal related (and not just personal finance related). But I of course still slipped in a few worthwhile personal finance resolutions. Let’s go through those first!

Personal Finance Goals

Max out our TFSAs

My main personal finance goal for 2022 was to max out my wife and I’s TFSAs.

This goal was meaningful because we had completely drained our TFSAs to come up with the downpayment on our home. And boy, was it a long journey to get them maxed. We finally completed it in October of this year, and plan to keep them maxed every year going forward.

In total, we contributed just over $43,000 to our TFSAs in 2022. Most of this was from savings, but a sizable amount was from some unexpected windfalls we received earlier this year.

Best of all, now that our TFSAs are full, it looks like it’ll only take us $13k to maximize them in 2023, based on the new $6,500 contribution limit.

Get a HELOC to Invest

Last year, I became acquainted with leveraged investing by investing a personal line of credit I received from Tangerine. And so for 2022, I set out to builld on this strategy by taking out a Home Equity Line of Credit (HELOC) to use for investing.

I’m happy to say that this goal has also been accomplished, and it started in April of this year when I first applied for a HELOC.

Since then I’ve been able to invest $60,000 using funds from this HELOC, with over $340,000 in room left available for me to deploy as needed.

This goal was a resounding success, as it allowed me to deploy a lot of extra cash just as the market took a turn this year. I’ll definitely keep this HELOC front of mind when coming up with my 2023 New Year’s resolutions.

Blog Goals

My blog goals were pretty modest for 2022. I think because I anticipated my work schedule for the year and knew I wouldn’t be able to dedicate as much time to blogging as I had in 2021.

Despite this, I achieved my goal to join an advertising network. That’s right, I just barely cleared the threshold required to join Monumetric, and since then my earnings per pageview have jumped dramatically.

This has meant that even though I’ve been writing a lot less this year, I still easily surpassed the $54 I earned blogging in my first year. Expect to see a post soon on me breaking down my numbers for 2022, including how my experience has been with Monumetric (FYI: They’ve been great!).

Personal Goals

I made three goals I categorized as “personal” in 2022. Let’s get started with the goal I failed…

Read 5 Books

I had a lot of hope for this goal. I bought a few books on Amazon to get me started and even made a Goodreads account to track my progress and save ideas for future books I’d like to read.

But despite getting off to a good start, reading “Atomic Habits” by James Clear early last year (which, ironically, did not help me build a book reading habit), my progress quickly nosedived and I didn’t complete another book all year.

I did attempt to complete a second book, Annie Duke’s “Thinking in Bets”, but found it too boring and predictable and only made it half way through.

I might have to revisit this New Year’s resolution and maybe come up with a better plan for completing it next year.

Continue Exercising

This New Year’s resolution has been a resounding success. Not only did I keep exercising, but I even increased the intensity and duration of my regular exercise by following up Peloton workouts with regular upper body and ab workouts.

My workout schedule involves intense exercise every second day, and on alternating days I usually go for a 15 to 30-minute walk with my wife around the neighbourhood.

Best of all, completing this resolution has done wonders for my mental health. I still need to keep an eye on it, but it’s safe to say that my anxiety is at a multi-year low. I plan to keep up my dedication to exercise in 2023.

Live in The Now

This New Year’s resolution was very important to me, but I didn’t have a good idea about how to succeed with it. Mainly because living in the now is a bit hard to define.

But basically my goal was to spend more money and time on making memories in 2022. And did I accomplish that? I think I did, and here’s why:

First of all, I went camping this summer (a few times!) for the first time in nearly 10 years. On top of that, I even planned a friends trip which took place this summer and was a total blast, and a few smaller trips with close family. And finally, I went on a huge international trip this year, spending more on travel than I have in my entire life.

So this has definitely been my favourite New Year’s resolution out of all the resolutions I made for 2022. It also taught me that it’s not easy to “live in the now”, and that it takes time and planning and real effort to create memorable experiences.

I hope it’s something I can keep up in 2023. I still plan to be a dedicated saver, but I am definitely looking for good opportunities to get more out of life and “live in the now.”

Thanks for Reading

I recently wrote a few articles that you may be interested in. This includes my post on capital gains tax in Canada and my how-to article on the getting cash back from your realtor! Consider giving those a read if you think they’ll help you on your financial journey!

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