Reflection on 2019 Goals

Christmas and New Year were perfect times to relax and focus on 2020 objectives write up. The year 2020 kicked off quickly with the normal life rhythm of school for the kids and business objectives at work. This means also a lot of business travel. The first trip in 2020 was a business trip to Newark,USA.  This blog post is written on the flight Brussels – Newark and finished in Penssylvania. Have you ever been to Newark ? 

Let’s reflect on the year 2019.

2017 was the year where we launched our blog and have grown our monthly visitors from 6000 visitors per month to more than 22.000 visitors per month. In 2018 we have crossed the 50.000 mark. Today we are reaching another milestone of 75.000. Year over Year our blog followers keeps on growing. Simply amazing. I am glad that more and more people realize that they have to learn how to grow their money and also teach their kids financial literacy. The financial literacy stupidity that I sometimes read of politicians or in newspapers from “so called financial expert” journalists is mind blowing and makes me angry and depressed from time to time…

In January 2019 we defined the following financial and travel goals. Did we meet or beat them?

Our 2019 Financial goals

Here are our five 2019 financial goals that we either consider Achieved or NOT Achieved.

1. Achieve a total of 15.000$ passive income for the total year 2019. Increase our monthly passive income to at least 700$. That is an increase of 200$ per month. NOT Achieved
2. Add ONE more trading skill set to our knowledge base. Achieved
3. Put my mom’s portfolio at work and generate at least a yearly 3.500$ passive income. That equals a 290$ a month. That is the same amount as last year. We will focus more on passive investing methods for my mom’s portfolio. NOT Achieved
4. Continue to grow my foster child and my kids’ portfolio. Monthly contributions for the portfolio of my foster child and dividend income focus for my kids’ portfolio. Grow our dividend and/or options income in my kids portfolio to 1000$ for the whole year. Achieved
5.  Give our sons at least 8 FINANCIAL educational lessons and teach them financial literacy, entrepreneurship and a growth mindset. NOT Achieved

In 2018 we didn’t hit the 10K challenge and now we didn’t hit 15K as a target….I also hear you thinking. Well…we are aiming too high, right ? 15.000$ was definitely achievable…with our forex trading skills as we finished at 15 million $ in demo at the end of December. We tried out different strategies with live and demo accounts. We never lost an account. We didn’t want to push our limits just to hit our yearly number at the end of the year. We ended the cash flow income with 8741,20 which is lower than 2018. The main reason for failing the 15K challenge is the fact that we executed less options trades and secondly we focused on learning the forex trading skills. I achieved this objective. That is the MOST IMPORTANT achievement ! This opens so much potential…I learned so much !

Our mom’s portfolio also grew with 2470$ cash. We made our mom a CASH PAYOUT of 2500 EURO after 3 YEARS of INVESTING ! I preferred to keep the cash invested in the portfolio to keep it growing but old style thinking still believes a savings account is a safer way to store… sadly enough. In our kids portfolio we quickly realized a 1000$ profit by writing secured puts on the gold miners ETF JNUG. After a few months, this ETF received a reversed split and it was impossible to write puts with the available cash on this portfolio. I need to research low priced stocks with a great premium payout going forward.

The last financial goal was to give our sons 8 financial education classes. We did two of the eight classes. In 2020 we will try out and apply a new strategy for the two teenagers. More information follows…

Our 2019 Travel goals

In our life we prefer to spend money on experiences instead of buying things.

Here were our five travel goals we defined for 2019

1. Let’s do our honeymoon. Past years we couldn’t fit in a honeymoon financially, nor time-wise. 2019 will be the year that Mrs DividendCake and myself travel to a honeymoon location. If you have ideas or suggestions for the perfect honeymoon location, write it below in the comments section. Achieved This is one of the most beautiful places I have been…simply amazing experience ! 
2. Plan and relax two weeks somewhere in the world with the family for a SUMMER vacation. Achieved
3. Visit this year three interesting spots in Belgium where kids can learn something and have a unique experience to remember. They don’t have to cost money to be great.
4. Do ONE city break vacation in 2019 with one of the kids. In 2018 we executed our “Travel with a budget” city trip. Let’s do something similar this year. Destination ideas are always welcome. NOT Achieved
5. Post a blog post of each travel or visit experience. Grow the popularity of the blog.We have today 53K visitors per month. Let’s keep on growing this number. Achieved
6. Inject the kids with cultural insights during our travel and teach them about history and other important facts in life. Write a travel chapter in their life story book. Achieved

Our honeymoon was simply amazing. Besides the great restaurants, we did a lot of activities such as snorkeling, visiting another Maldives isle, jet ski, … and many massages we never experiences before. Have you ever heard from the Cleopatra bath? Well, I can definitely recommend you this spa experience… Take your beloved one and travel to the Maldives as it’s not boring as most people think. If you make it boring, it’s your own fault.

We spend also a nice family vacation in Corsica despite the mosquitoes biting me 80 times. Unfortunately we didn’t execute the Travel with a Budget trip. Our blog kept on growing with more visitors and we spoke at a Bloggers Conference in Budapest about our 1 Million $ Strategy. Would you like to learn this strategy? Keep on following us this year. We visited different cities in Belgium and have given our kids more cultural experiences too.

Final words

As final word, we conclude with saying that we view 2019 as a FANTASTIC year. We have set ourselves up for amazing results and cash flow income.

We look forward to 2020 as we have fantastic plans ahead of us. We have defined new projects for the blog and also new financial and travel objectives. You can all read about it next week.

Good luck with your personal finance strategy and learning how to grow money ! Thanks for following us on Twitter and Facebook and reading this blog post. As always we end with a quote.