Achieving My First Long-Term Goal

When I started this blog, I had several long-term goals. They were around reducing my uninvested cash and returning me a reasonable rate of return.

This has been a tough year for investing in the stock or bond markets. The worst on record for the bond market and a rocky year for stocks too. A double-whammy.

So I decided to slow down my quest to invest every dollar. Holding cash was a wise “intentional strategy” but a foolish “unintentional one”.

So as we reach the end of the year, I still find myself with 38% of my cash uninvested. That means 61% of my cash IS invested. That’s not bad.

That percentage of uninvested cash is slightly lower than in the summer, mainly due to someone I decided to help this fall. I won’t go into details, but sometimes you need to help someone in need, and that’s the best use of the cash. I have also been sending money to the government before next year’s taxes. They’ll likely owe me a huge refund, but better that than for me to owe them.

The title of this post is achieving my first long-term goal, and that’s true.

I did the calculations tonight, and my investments now return 10% of my goal, in dollar terms.

I broke the goal into 10%, 33%, and 75% milestones since I know this will take years to achieve. I just achieved 10% of the goal, and I did it before my expected deadline of the end of the year.

The overall goal is still 100% of my annual business income. Which is a lofty goal.

My business continues to operate and continues to grow. But if my investments can make what my business makes in a year, that will be a comfortable place to be. Then it won’t matter if my business declines or I decide to shut it down.