2023 New Year’s Resolutions

Welcome to my post outlining my New Year’s resolutions for the next year. In it, I’ll take what I learned from my past two years of goal setting and try to come up with new goals for 2023 that will have a real impact on my personal and financial well-being.

If you’re interested, check out my recent post reviewing my 2022 New Year’s resolutions. Much of my plans for 2023 come out of what I learned over the last year trying (and failing) to achieve my goals.

Coming up with SMART Goals

For those unfamiliar, SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound goals. Coming up with a great goal often means ensuring it fits all five of these criteria.

SMART goals are powerful. By defining your goals to fit these criteria, you ensure your goal is realistic and easy to understand when you’ve succeeded in your goal or are falling behind.

I’ll take some inspiration from Tawcan (a great personal finance blogger) and make sure all of my New Year’s resolutions are SMART so I can keep myself accountable and share my progress with you all throughout the year.

Blog Goals

Unlike last year (due to work commitments), I hope to be much more engaged on my blog in 2023. To that end, I’ve defined two New Year’s resolutions that I hope you’ll all appreciate.

Publish a Blog Post Every Monday

The first resolution I’d like to commit to is adopting a more consistent posting schedule. Specifically, my goal is to publish a blog post every Monday.

Now, this is a very hard goal to achieve, but I have a lot of great mentors in the personal finance community who have done this for years (Tawcan comes to mind!).

I think it comes down to developing a strong writing habit where nearly every day, you dedicate some time to writing—be it for an hour or even as little as 10 minutes.

I think this goal is worthwhile because posting weekly helps my readers build their own habit of (hopefully) checking my blog once a week since they know there will be new content. At the very least, that’s how I’ve been consuming a lot of other personal finance blogs.

Interact more with my Readers

The second goal I have is to think of more ways I can interact with my readers.

Many of you follow me on Twitter, and that has been a great outlet for sharing and discussing personal finance, but I feel like having more of those discussions on my blog would benefit a larger audience.

So to achieve that, I plan to solicit questions from readers in 2023 where I can respond and, if permitted, publish the content of their question and my response right here on my blog (all anonymously, of course!).

Hopefully you all can help me achieve this goal by submitting your questions for me to answer. I’ll do my best to respond to all questions via email, even if they don’t make their way onto my blog.

Financial

Maxminize my RRSP

My big financial goal last year was to maximize my wife’ and I’s TFSAs. And now that goal is complete, so it should be very easy for us to keep them maxed in 2023 and beyond.

So for 2023, my New Year’s resolution will focus on my RRSP.

After running my numbers, it looks like I’ll have around $30,000 worth of room in my RRSP in 2023. And at a marginal tax rate of 40%, it has become exceedingly worthwhile to contribute to this account.

And so, for 2023, my goal is to maximize my RRSP!

This is an ambitious goal and will take some planning and dedication to achieve it on top of ensuring my wife’s and I’s TFSAs are both maxed. But it’s completely in line with our long-term goal of financial independence. I can’t wait!

Personal

Live in The Now

Last year I got a lot out of my goal to “Live in The Now,” where I focused more money, time and energy on creating memories with family and friends. I plan to continue with that goal but to make it SMART so I can keep track of my progress throughout the year.

So, here’s a list of four specific goals I have to ensure I “Live in The Now” in 2023:

• Go camping three times
• Go on a friends trip
• Go on a road trip
• Visit two new countries

That last one will probably be the most difficult. As someone who previously wasn’t very interested in travelling (and did not have many travel opportunities), it’ll take a lot of effort and cash (or Aeroplan points!) to make it happen.

Maintain my Health

The last personal goal I have for 2023 is to maintain my health. To achieve that, I have two SMART goals:

• Work out every second day
• Eat sweets or alcohol only once per week

I’ve already formed a good habit of working out every second day, so for 2023 my goal is to maintain that habit and keep building on what I’ve done so far.

Eating sweets is something I really want to cut back on in 2023 (seriously, I have no self control!). To do that I plan to only allow myself to eat sweets once per week. I already limit myself to beer at most once per week, so it seems like a good strategy to combine that habit with this new habit I’d like to form.

Read 5 Books

This is a goal I struggled with last year. I simply couldn’t break my terrible habit of using my phone before bed (which, by the way, I am convinced is making me a dumber person).

But in 2023 I’m bringing this goal back, fresh and with a vengeance. I plan on reading 5 books in 2023 by consistently reading before bed and during periods of downtime during the day (like when travelling, sitting by a campfire, or relaxing on my patio).

To help get me started, I’ve researched and added the following books to my must-read list:

• The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company
• Humbitious: The Power of Low-Ego, High-Drive Leadership

If anyone can recommend some personal finance books, I’d love to add them to my list for 2023!

Thanks for Reading

Thank you so much for reading if you made it this far. Please do let me know what you think about my New Year’s resolutions for 2023. Also, do let me know in the comments below if you made any New Year’s resolutions yourself, or if you can think of a great personal finance-related New Year’s resolutions!

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