2023 New Year’s Resolutions: Q1 Update

Each year I try to come up with New Year’s resolutions. These are essentially just time-boxed goals most often related to my blog, financial or personal life.

This continues a habit I started in 2021, where I shared my New Year’s resolutions with you, my readers, as a commitment device to help me achieve them.

In 2023 I made 6 New Year’s resolutions, and now that we’re just about done with the first quarter of 2023, it’s time for me to update you on my progress!

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

Table Of Contents
  1. Blog Goals
  2. Financial
  3. Personal
  4. Conclusion
  5. Thanks for Reading

Blog Goals

Unlike last year, I hope to be much more engaged on my blog in 2023. To help me achieve that, I defined two New Year’s resolutions that I’ve been working towards.

Publish a Blog Post Every Monday (Succeeding)

This New Year’s resolution is probably my most challenging. It’s so difficult to write enough quality blog posts to post every week. But surprisingly, so far at least, I’ve been achieving this goal.

In total, I’ve already posted 12 times in 2023. And on top of this, I’ve written around a half dozen blog posts to use later this year—on weekends when I’m travelling or too busy to contribute to my blog.

What’s helped me is to just write something every couple of days—even if I’m not sure what to write or if I don’t think it’ll be very good. It’s also helped me to have less of a focus on SEO-optimized blog posts. These are posts that take a lot of time and research and are too challenging to write every week.

I give myself a “Succeeding” for this resolution. Yay! Now I just need to keep it up.

Interact More With My Readers (Needs Improvement)

The second New Year’s resolution is to interact more with my readers.

I made a few moves towards achieving this goal. For one thing, I added a new “Ask Me Anything” button that readers can use to submit their questions.

However, I have only gotten a few questions so far. I think I haven’t done a good enough job advertising this button or encouraging people to submit their questions.

What’s worse is that although I’ve been answering peoples’ questions via email, I have yet to convert any of these into posts I can publish on my blog. I need to focus more on this in Q2 this year.

I give myself a “Needs improvement” for this resolution.

Financial

Maximize My RRSP (Succeeding)

My big financial goal last year was to maximize my wife’s and my TFSAs. And now that goal is complete, my new goal is to maximize my RRSP.

And so far, I’ve made a lot of progress toward maximizing this account. In 2023 I have made two contributions of $600, one contribution of $8,000 and another contribution of $10,000.

Although I don’t have the exact numbers from the CRA, I can do a rough calculation of how much RRSP room I have left. Here are the numbers:

  • Contribution room for 2022 = $40,800
  • Contributions since March 2022 = $36,500
  • New space for 2023 = $22,000

That means I have approximately $26,300 in RRSP room remaining before I maximize this account.

With all my progress, I’ll give myself a “Succeeding” for this resolution. If I continue saving, I should have this account maxed before the end of 2023!

Personal

Live in the now (Succeeding)

This New Year’s resolution was especially important to me. Basically, my goal is to focus more money, time and energy on creating memories with family and friends. To “Live in the now,” so to speak.

So far I’ve made a lot of progress toward this goal. In my January net worth update, I shared that I went on a big ski trip to Big White Ski Resort. Although this wasn’t on my original list of ideas, it is definitely fulfilling the spirit of the goal to “Live in the now” and make memories with family and friends.

I also made progress towards travelling and visiting new countries by spending over $4,000 on future travel this year.

There’s more work to do when it comes to planning things like road trips or hiking expeditions with family and friends. But overall, I would say I’m happy with the progress I’ve made on this goal. I give myself a “Succeeding.”

Maintain my health (Succeeding Plus)

This New Year’s resolution sought to continue my habit of working out almost every other day and also minimizing my alcohol intake. I also wanted to fix a bad habit I had of eating too many sweets.

The alcohol habit is still going strong—I only drink a beer on the weekend, usually once per week, or if visiting friends.

On the exercise front, I have made my habit even stronger by waking up early every day to exercise in the morning. Lately, I’ve been exercising up to 5 days a week, which is much more than the 3 or 4 times per week I was doing in 2022.

I have also done a good job reducing the number of sweets I eat. I’ve simply avoided purchasing sweets or tried to turn them down when others offer them. I have even gone so far as to throw out candy or sweets I had in the house so I wouldn’t be tempted.

I give myself a “Succeeding Plus” for this goal. Woohoo!

Read 5 books (Succeeding)

This is a goal I always need help with. I first committed to this goal for my 2022 New Year’s resolutions and completely failed to achieve it, only having read one book in 2022—embarrassing!

2023 has gotten off to a much better start. I have already read one book for work. It was a little under 300 pages but otherwise a quick read. On my recent ski trip, I think I read at least 100 pages. Since then I have tried to build a habit of reading at least 5 pages every night before bed.

After finishing, I picked up another book that I’ve been meaning to read: The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company.

So far I’m really enjoying this book. I read “Shoe Dog” by Phil Knight in 2021, and I find “The Ride of a Lifetime” to be similar in that it’s an autobiography of a successful CEO of a world-famous company. I’m about a fourth of the way through this book and will hopefully be done in a month or so.

I give myself a “Succeeding” for this goal.

Conclusion

This year I’ve done a good job sticking to my New Year’s resolutions. Out of six, I only have one resolution that I need to improve on: interacting more with my readers.

If you’d like to help me out with that goal, consider submitting a question. The topic can be anything, be it retirement, FIRE, blogging, investing and more!

Please look out for my next New Year’s resolution update for Q2! You can expect it to be posted sometime in June.

Thanks for Reading

I recently wrote a few articles that you may be interested in. This includes my analysis of my recent property assessment and my update to my best preferred share ETF. Consider giving those a read if you think they’ll help you on your financial journey!

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