Looking Forward to 2025
Review on 2024 and Plan for 2025
Welcome back to the final post for the 2024. All in all it has been a pretty good year work wise and saving / investing wise.
- Looking at the major indices’ YTD at time of writing (Dec 27th, 2024)
- S&P is up 25.43%
- Nasdaq is up 32.93%
- Dow Jones is up 13.64%
- S&P/TSX 60 is up 17.01%
Health wise I had a bit of a rough year nothing major but a few incidents that put a damper on the year for sure. Oh well that is a part of getting older I guess, and I am thankful for my health and my wealth thus far.
2024 Achievements (in no particular order)
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Started this blog. Definitely seems like an obvious one but I have though about a blog for a few years and tried a bit of video content creation which I inevitably stopped after a few months
- Speaking of video content creation I revived my abandoned youtube channel from last year and did a rebrand to match this blog.
- As mentioned in previous posts I have a mixture of short motivational / knowledge nuggets videos and longer form videos which are typically a blog post in video form
- Savings Rate of just shy of 33%
- For simplicity this only considers deposits into my TFSA / RRSP and Work RRSP. Any money kicking around in a bank account is not included.
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Successfully negotiated a mortgage renewal from the high to low 6s. We decided to go with a one year fixed year of pain and with all of the rate cuts we have seen since May and the spread for variable at that time I am happy with our decision.
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Posted YouTube short a day for 60 days starting in mid October and ending mid December
- Took some time for ourselves as we have been pretty tight with money since we liquidated everything to buy the house (2021) and our destination wedding in (2023).
- We took 3 trips to be exact one somewhat locally in Niagara, our New York Trip and a quick trip to Costa Rica.
Goals for 2025
- Maintain investing savings rate of 33%
- Typically you want to set your goals higher but any extra money I believe I am going to start reducing some debt. I still have mortgage, line of credit (used for investing), and OSAP. Now that I have built up a bit of a base I would like to go after some of the emotional wins from clearing those.
- Open spousal RRSP
- this is a big one for us as my wife’s tax bracket is lower that mine so its best for her savings to go to the TFSA aside from any work matching programs and for me to get the tax benefit of contributing to the RRSP
- I am really hoping WealthSimple will provide a self directed RRSP account type soon.
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50 blog posts. Essentially I would like to have 1 post a week and am allowing for 2 misses
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25 long form videos on YouTube. Or essentially 2 a month.
- 50 short videos
- These will likely be done sporadically with 1 big month of 1 short every day
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Negotiate our bundled home and car insurance. I could be wrong but I strongly believe we have been overpaying for the past year or so.
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Negotiate our mortgage renewal. Will likely consult a brokerage who can lay out all of the current options for us. I would like to lock in a 5 year fixed that is portable but that all depends on the numbers we see in April / May
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150 30minute workouts. This is essentially 3 workouts a week and since I don’t have a gym membership it will be low impact HIIT style with kettle bells, bands and body weight.
- Improve on the blog. While I haven’t decided what this exactly means yet, at a high level I would like to:
- Fix the light mode dark mode toggle
- Beef up the about me.
- Improve the back linking between the blog and youtube
- Fine tune the ad placement and type
- Learn more about SEO and implement it, perhaps adding a blog post about that.
- Introduce quarterly check-in posts with videos seeing how closely I am tracking my goals set for the year.
That’s all for this week! I would like to wish you a Happy New Year and hope you join me back here in 2025 for more weekly posts.
Cheers! ☕