Well, they say April showers bring May flowers right? I know we got a lot of rain here in Illinois where I live. I can say that my goals for April did not move forward as much as I'd have liked, but they did progress somewhat. I am using it as a springboard into May though. Check out my update below to see how I got into each of my goals.
Why am I discussing my goals on my blog?
These monthly check-ins are going to be where I show you my successes and failures over my seven areas I'm working in. Those being:
- Spirituality
- Career
- Family
- Financial
- Intellectual
- Physical
- Social
I feel that by setting goals in each area of my life, I'll be working on my whole person instead of just one specific area of my life. I think when we focus on our whole self, we will be less likely to sabotage ourselves due to getting over excited about one area or another and we will see some great balanced growth through the year.
2017 Goals: Spirituality
Read the Bible in one year devotional
April's Bible reading has been my worst month to date. I feel that I've kind of petered out as I only completed seven days of reading this past month. I am resolving to make May much stronger.
I haven't been getting up as early as I was the past few months, and have let my old habits of just getting straight into life before doing my devotional get in my way once again.
Altogether, I'm now 72 days into the 365 day plan.
2017 Goals: Career
Take a writing course or two.
One of the courses came up and I didn't even try to make it fit yet... Will have to keep working at it and try to schedule some time to get this one in as well.
Increase my online connections to over 10,000.
For April, we connected to another 318 connections, bringing my total to just over 4,800. I'm continuing to push forward. I've connected all my social channels into the app Crowdfire and have started to see some fun results. I've also been focusing on sharing more fun content about my time with my girls as well as stuff that I've been reading. We will see how it continues to grow!
My largest growth came from Twitter once again, bringing in 219 of the 318 connections.
With this growth, it puts me at almost halfway to my goal of 10,000 connections!Here's the chart for the numbers and how they broke down:
Hit 50,000 page views.
April dropped again from March, mainly due to me not working on the site as much as I have in previous months. However, we did pass the 10,000 page view mark this past month. Organic search stayed steady this month, coming in with only two searches less than March. Overall, I'm around 20% of the way to my goal in my first 4 months. Although a little behind, I think it's still a manageable goal to hit for the year and should see growth over the next nine months from my efforts.
Here's my chart showing my page views from April:
2017 Goals: Family
Preschool Home School Course
April was a great month to be out and about. And we definitely were. We focused on different types of activities, so we didn't make much progress in our preschool curriculum. We are currently in week 13 on this course.
One date night per month
We ended up splurging this month and had two date nights.
We were able to go out for my wife's birthday. I took her to a special dinner at a Brazilian steakhouse called Fogo De Chao. It was her first time and she enjoyed it!
For our other date night, we were able to go out for dinner with my brother and sister in law! It's always nice to catch up with family. We decided to go to On The Border and had the margarita specials!
4 Vacations
No vacations in April, but we do have our second one coming up at the end of May and another at the beginning of June, so it's right around the corner! Doing some last minute planning and getting our ducks in a row!
2017 Goals: Financial
Contribute 15% of gross income to investments
No real news to report here. We were able to put the extra $45 that we saved from canceling Netflix and Sling into our Roth again this month. We are not quite there, as we are still going to need to find an additional $3,677 still although I haven't factored in the extra 2 paychecks that we'll have for our three paycheck months (June and November for us) this year. It sounds like we aren't going to make this at this point yet since we had to dip into our emergency fund to replace our roof. But, we are still going to keep it on here and push hard for it!
Currently, we are almost 29% to our goal for the year!
Grow Net Worth to $120,000
April was our first down month of 2017. The punches keep rolling here, don't they? We took a big hit of $7,248 to our net worth, mainly due to replacing our roof. This brings our net worth down to just under $100,000 again. But, as Derek from HowDoIMoney.com commented, we get to pass the $100,000 mark twice now!
2017 Goals: Intellectual
Read seven educational books
Good news in this area!
In April, I finished my fourth book of the year. I read "The Case For Christ" by Lee Strobel. It was the student edition, but was still very good, nonetheless. I found his research quite compelling and, even though I was a believer before reading, it's great to have that resource under my belt as well!
This puts me at four out of my seven books for the year!
2017 Goals: Physical
Lose 20 pounds
My progress finally came to a halt this month. After a good run since January, I ended up gaining back almost five pounds this month. I'm ok with it since I don't want to lose too much weight too quickly. I think that because I didn't work out as much this month as well as not eating as well played a bigger role in the weight gain. I'm still well within on track to complete my goal this year.
I started the month at 224.6 lbs and got up to 229.5 lbs as of April 30th.
Go to the gym 3-5 times per week
With everything else going on in April, we didn't make it to the gym nearly enough in April. I only recorded 9 workouts through this month, not meeting my goal here. I'm looking to rebound big time in May.
2017 Goals: Social
Staying In A Small Group
I made all but one of my Men's group meetings for April. I took one off because we didn't have the kids and wanted to have a date night together at home relaxing, so we took advantage.
Making Time For Fun
As the weather has been good, we've been outside as much as possible. I would say that I've been off social media better this past month.
Wrapping up April 2017 Goals
We had a few setbacks in April, but still managed to make some progress. Looking forward to May and the progress we will make there as well!
How did your April end up?
Don't neglect your goals if you've felt like you're getting beat up by them! You can always start fresh today!
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Steven Goodwin
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