Hey everyone, it’s Whatever Wednesdays again. Today will just be a short post about “2019“.

2018 has come and went… and it’s 2019.

Looking back on this last year, a lot of stuff has happened. My 20 Year Career plan is still in process and has evolved as expected. There have been some small monkey wrenches financially in my plan which required some fixing, but overall, we are on track.

That said, there are some things I didn’t do during 2018 that I really wanted to do. I felt it was good to keep myself accountable for them here:

Monetizing my blog

I really wanted to monetize my blog in 2018… but it just didn’t happen. It’s entirely my fault, but I just can’t seem to piece together enough time to get it done. That said, I’m going to try to make it a priority for 2019.

Like anything, I just need to do the research and set up a reasonable model for what I want to achieve with this blog. Then we’ll take it from there.

House Stuff

The small fixes I’ve wanted to make to the house have increased in scope and scale slightly. However, the budget is there in order to make them happen this year.

I want to renovate the lanai, repaint the house, and put on a new garage door. These changes will make the house look pretty good from the outside.

After that, we can look at making a few fixes inside the house over the next 3-5 years.

Student Loans

The original plan was to put some heavy extra payments into the student loans this year since Kylie started public school. However, we needed to recover our emergency fund to a reasonable level. Then, on top of that, we needed to save some additional money for the above house stuff. I also felt it was important to increase our 529 contributions as well. When all was said and done, nothing much changed student loans wise for 2018, other than the normal auto-payments continuing on.

However, since we should have some extra money this year, all of that extra money will go into the student loans. The plan to have them gone before the kids finish elementary school is still in play. This is a lot longer than I wanted to have them (and that I advise), but I had to make changes in the plan based on other priorities (buying a house).

Roadmaps

I just realized it’s been awhile since I’ve done my quarterly Medicine Mondays, Whatever Wednesdays, and Finance Fridays roadmaps.

Apparently, the last roadmap update was end of February into March… so it’s been almost a year since the Roadmaps. I’ll try to update all the Roadmaps for next week as well as update the Crypto Posts section and clean it up as well.

Quora

I recently passed 1 million views on my Quora account. However, I haven’t written an answer on there for a long time.

I would like to start answering more questions on there if I have more time, but there haven’t been any questions that have piqued my interest. Most of the questions I get asked to answer revolve around Crypto and are usually based around price speculation. That kind of question doesn’t really interest me.

Cardano (ADA) and Crypto

I still believe in the Cardano ecosystem (and Crypto in general) despite the fact that it (and the rest of the Crypto market) has taken a huge hit in price and commensurate decrease in overall market cap.

There are a lot of things in store for 2019 for Cardano and I am pretty excited about them. I would like to run my own stake pool this year when Shelley is released. I’m also really excited about eventual Ledger integration which should happen sometime in early 2019. For those who don’t know, Trezor integration was recently announced.

Kylie

My daughter is 5 years old and she continues to grow up before my eyes. She amazes me with her sweet personality, curiosity, and strong work ethic. This last year she hasn’t been too interested in continuing her YouTube channel, but we may revisit it this year if she wants.

She has developed an interest in drawing and continues to be interested in baking. So, in order to cultivate these interests, I have an idea for a children’s book that I was going to help her write and illustrate. Then we may self-publish it on Amazon or something if she wants. Either way, I think it would be a fun thing for her to do and be proud of. Cooking is a little more difficult since there aren’t that many cooking classes for kids. However, I’m going to continue to look into it so she learns how.

Lucas

Lucas is a ball of energy that does not know how to stay still. However, since he’s only 3 years old, I guess that comes with the territory. He is very different from his sister, and much more motor skill oriented rather than verbal like she was. I would like to channel that energy into some kind of sport. While he likes hitting the ball off the tee and kicking the soccer ball around, neither seems to hold his interest long enough to play for a team – at least not yet.

He is late born so he won’t start school until he is almost 6 years old. However, I’d like for him to start Kumon sometime this year (if possible) to give him a strong foundation.

I am happy that he loves Transformers and LEGOs like I did as a kid.

My better half

My beautiful wife is an outstanding wife and loving mother. She is also an excellent child and adolescent psychiatrist – and she works very, very hard. Unfortunately, she sometimes forgets to give herself a break or take some time away for herself.

My plan this year to help her with that. This means making sure she gets some time away from work and away from the kids (and away from me even). For me this means making sure she can go do the things she wants to do, like get a manicure/pedicure or a spa treatment once in awhile. I’m also going to try to organize a few more date nights and/or staycations this year.

I think the major hurdle is to just organize these things without telling her. The reason for this is that whenever I ask she doesn’t want to take away any of her time from the kids – so she just doesn’t do it. However, if it’s already been planned by me and paid for, I think it’ll be easier to just go with the flow.

The Wagon

I fell off the wagon again… so I need to once again need to try to be better about eating out less the nights I’m at work.

The Value Cost Ratio for eating out at work just isn’t very good. However, it’s just so easy to grab fast food when I’m at work, but I really need to stop doing that. Those meals add up fast, both in the financial sense, and in regards to my waistline. I’m going to try to institute a new limit on eating out while at work to maybe once or twice per 8 day shift.

Hopefully I can stick to it this time.

TL;DR

Just some goals I wrote down for 2019.

This post is more just for me to read down my thoughts and keep myself accountable.

This post got a lot longer than I thought it would be.

-Sensei

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