After the dumpster fire of 2020, we were all looking forward to the hope and promise of a new year. As the seconds ticked down to midnight on December 31, Allison and I shared a toast and a kiss. I thought about that song “Feeling Good” by Nina Simone from 1965:

It's a new dawn
It's a new day
It's a new life for me, ooh
And I'm feeling good

Then, on January 6, a riotous mob broke into and invaded our nation’s Capitol building, resulting in mayhem, destruction, and death. Now the President has been impeached for inciting the violence, and we are facing the threats of more violence. 

Oh, and by the way, we’re still dealing with record COVID-19 cases and deaths. Not to mention, our (and the world’s) economy has been extremely battered for the past 10 months, with millions of jobs lost, small businesses gone bankrupt, and many of our fellow humans facing losing their homes.

 

Let’s Stay Positive

Vaccines: The COVID-19 vaccines are the biggest reason to be optimistic about the new year. The scientific community pulled together and created multiple high-efficacy vaccines at astonishing speed. 

New Administration: Though we’ll have to get through the impeachment and threats of violence, eventually the new administration will settle in and hopefully bring some much-needed healing and unity to our nation. Whatever your political beliefs, sometimes change is good.

Economy: While many have suffered economically during the pandemic, the stock market has continued to perform remarkably well (reminder that the stock market does not equal the economy, it’s only one factor). The Biden administration just announced their “American Rescue Plan,” a $1.9 trillion plan that could bring much-needed relief to millions.

Goals: Optimistic by nature, we wrapped up 2020 with a post about how we made the most of a crappy year. Going into 2021, we put together some goals and plans for the new year around four topics: Projects, Health, Connections, and Finance.

Perhaps our goals will spark some inspiration and fuel for your own fun and challenging things to tackle in 2021! 

 

Projects

Despite the pandemic, we were able to tackle several big projects in 2020. Our greatest accomplishment was writing and publishing not one, but two books! We also embarked on a really fun road trip and used a “Declutter challenge” to free ourselves from excess stuff.

This year, we’ll be looking to take on some new projects to challenge ourselves and get our creative juices flowing.

 

1. Travel Again (if possible)

Being able to travel is one the perks we love best about FIRE. With the vaccines starting to roll out, we are hoping there will be some safe travel opportunities this year. We’re looking at it in a four-stage rollout, which would look like this over the course of 2021:

Q1: Road Trip II -- We bought an annual National Park pass during our last road trip, and we’re planning to use it to see many more of our nation’s wonderful parks. We’re eyeing a trip sometime in March around southern California, Utah, Arizona, and perhaps beyond. Let us know in the comments below if you have any recommendations!

Q2: Wedding -- Like many people, Allison’s younger sister had to postpone her 2020 wedding into 2021. Hopefully she and her fiancée, Anthony, will be able to pull it off safely in June, and we’ll be able to fly to NYC and NJ to visit them and our other family members (from both sides).

Q3: FinCon -- FinCon 2021 is currently scheduled for Austin, TX in September, and we plan to be there. We’ve never been to Austin, so we’re excited to see what the hubbub is all about, as well as getting together with the FC “money nerd” community again!

Q4: International -- I’m not holding my breath, but if things are safe enough, we might be able to pull off an international trip at the end of the year. We set a 60x60 goal (60 countries by age 60), and we have 30 more to go in the next 10 years (no time to waste!).

 

2. Do More with Retire By 45

In 2016, we started the website RetireBy45.com and began writing about achieving FIRE, sharing our experiences and providing tips, resources, and inspiration. During the 4+ years since launching, we’ve written dozens of blog posts, created several online courses, been featured in a variety of articles and podcasts, and written two books. 

Despite all that, I feel like there’s a lot more we could be doing with our brand. This year, I’d like to start working on ways to improve and build out our wonderful little side business. 

It could be a variety of things: finding more outlets for our books (e.g., schools and libraries), improving and expanding our courses, and writing more interesting and informative blog posts. It might also be expanding our voice on outlets like Instagram and Youtube.

Note: Allison took over our Instagram account recently and has really improved it, so check it out!...

Bonus project: We may even be inspired to dust off and revisit our original blog, Experiencify, which is dedicated to having amazing life experiences (e.g., Travel, Adventures, Events, and Food).

 

3. Fun Self-Improvement Projects

Besides travel, another great perk of FIRE is being able to work on fun and interesting projects that have nothing to do with making money - just things that you enjoy doing. It might be building something, learning new skills, or anything that brings joy and satisfaction to your life.

Some projects I could see us enjoying in 2021: getting our SCUBA certification, learning new languages and how to play the guitar, reading more, and writing another book (fiction or nonfiction). The first two will come in handy when we can travel again, and the others satisfy our creative desires.

 

Health

Being healthy is crucial for a happy and satisfying life, so we always make it a priority to maintain and improve our overall physical and mental health. Allison turned 50 in 2020, and I hit the big 5-0 in a few weeks. Fortunately, we feel great for 50, but we don’t want to take it for granted.

Last year we focused on building out a home workout space, getting outside each day, and preparing healthy meals at home. We’ll be doing all of that again in 2021, but we’ll add these three items to the plan.

 

4. Overcome COVID-19

Knock on lots of wood, but it doesn’t appear that we contracted COVID-19 in 2020 (although we never had antibody tests to be sure). We always did our best to be safe when shopping or doing our road trip to avoid the virus. We masked up, we kept our distance from people, and we were adamant about washing and sanitizing our hands (it helps that Allison was a germophobe pre-COVID).

Our first health goal for 2021 is to continue to avoid getting the virus and get vaccinated as soon as it’s available to us. In addition to contracting it ourselves, we don’t want to unwittingly spread it to someone else (especially anyone who is elderly or more vulnerable).

 

5. Go Beyond Home Workouts

Although we’ve done an admirable job of setting up a home workout environment, it doesn’t take the place of a real gym and equipment. Once our condo gym is available for use again, we’ll be able to replace our makeshift weights with some real iron.

In addition to the gym, we need to dust off the bicycles in our storage unit. Before my hip surgery, riding a bike was really painful, so we stored them away and forgot about them. Now that I have a new hip, we can break them out again!

And lastly, I’d like to do a lot more hiking this year. Running isn’t recommended after a hip replacement (you can do it, but it may reduce the life span of the new joint), but walking and hiking are no problem. 

 

6. Refocus on Mental Health

Between the pandemic, the never-ending divisive politics, the civil unrest, and the recent Capitol assault, it’s been a rough period of time for everyone mentally. We’re cooped up inside, we can’t meet up with friends and family, we can’t hug people, and we’re inundated with horrible news all day long. It’s been a recipe for mental health disaster.

(Note: the CDC has a page on coping with stress during a pandemic.)

What can you do? We already exercise regularly, walk outside every day, and eat a healthy diet. In addition to all that, I plan to do a bit of the following to help my mental health in 2021: reduce exposure to news feeds, commit to a daily meditation practice, cut down on social media, read more books, write more blog posts, and spend time cuddling with Allison every morning. (Just writing those down reduces my blood pressure!)

 

Connecting

Last year we spent most of our time connecting with others virtually. This was better than nothing, but definitely doesn’t take the place of in-person contact.

In 2021, we are really looking forward to being able to get back to connecting in the real world. Here are some ways we hope to do that:

 

7. Get Back to Normal Activities

Before the pandemic, Allison and I were always out and about doing fun and interesting things in our community. We would go to museums, eat at our favorite restaurants, get massages, enjoy the theatre, and attend sports events. 

All of that came to a halt in 2020, and we’re eager to get back to that lifestyle. Once we are vaccinated and things start opening up again, we’ll make up for lost time. It’ll probably start with a proper haircut for Allison, who has only had one since shelter-in-place began!

 

8. Doing Things with People

It’ll be strange at first, but eventually we’ll be able to meet up with people again. When society starts opening up, we will definitely be getting together with family, friends, and neighbors for coffee, drinks, meals, hikes, and social events. 

Some things we’ll be looking forward to: social events in our building (I’m co-chair of our Social Committee), local FIRE meetups, community gatherings in our neighborhood, and reacquainting ourselves with our local merchants (for those that survive the pandemic).

 

9. FinCon in Austin

As we mentioned in our travel plans for 2021, we are all set to attend FinCon in Austin this September. It’s always fun meeting and interacting with people from the FIRE community and other areas of personal finance. If you're going, come find us!

We’ve never been to Austin, and everyone keeps talking about what a cool city it is, so we’re looking forward to exploring it for a few days outside of the conference. We have been to two in-person FinCons (Orlando in ‘18 and DC in ‘19) and attended the virtual event in 2020. We always add time to our trip, like our side trip to Disney World after Orlando in 2018.

 

Finances

We didn’t do much with our finances in 2020. In fact, one of the things we did do was essentially stay put. When the markets crashed in March after the pandemic hit, our only tactic was to rebalance our portfolios to keep in line with our long-term plans.

This year, we’ll likely do more of the same -- rebalancing each quarter with an eye toward maintaining (if not growing) our nest egg. However, we do have some broader financial projects that we can work on.

 

10. Create a Spending Plan

This is a really fun project that Allison and I have been talking about doing for some time now. It involves figuring out how to spend more money than we currently do. 

It came about after a consultation with our Vanguard financial consultant, who ran our numbers through their version of a Monte Carlo analysis. The results showed that we have a >99% chance of not outliving our money. This is not only because we built up a sizable nest egg, but also because we live a frugal lifestyle (with no mortgage). This has been compounded in 2020 since we haven’t been spending money on travel or entertainment.

So, we’ve designated Allison as our CSO (Chief Spending Officer). Her job is to figure out how we want to spend our money going forward. We’re more about experiences than physical stuff, so she’ll be in charge of figuring out what experiences we should focus on. 

It also will involve more philanthropic endeavors. Our hearts broke every time we saw stories about people going hungry or losing their family business, so we opened our wallets more frequently to try to help out. We’ll continue that tradition going forward.

Giving back: One of our first donations of the year is providing 40 copies of "Investing for Kids" to YALA (Young Ambassadors Leadership Academy), which helps mentor and inspire young Black males.

 

11. Legacy Planning

This leads to another project that has been on our back burner -- legacy planning. We need to put together a living trust (and/or will) and a legacy plan. One of my favorite finance books is The Simple Path to Wealth. In it, author JL Collins describes “how to give like a billionaire,” which explains how to set up a charitable foundation, and why it’s the best way to manage your charitable donations. 

Vanguard has some great tools to set this up. Our job is to determine how and where we want our donations to be delivered when we pass away.

 

12. Evaluate Living Options

We recently wrote a post about Where to FIRE in the 2020’s in which we discussed a variety of factors in determining where to live in your FIRE years. Those include geographic, financial, and social criteria, as well options like downsizing, renting instead of owning, and becoming a nomad.

We’ve owned our own home for over 20 years now (includes a number of houses and condos over those years). Recently, we’ve been toying with the idea of going back to renting or living a more nomadic lifestyle to give ourselves more freedom. There are a number of pros and cons for those options, so this year I’d like to spend more time evaluating our long-term plan.

 

How About You?

Have any of our plans for 2021 sparked ideas for your own new year? Depending on your stage in life and where you are on your path to FIRE, your goals could be radically different from ours. 

You still might want to consider breaking out your goals into the same categories: projects, health, connecting, and finances. 

For projects, think of things that spur your creativity, earn some extra money, or push you out of your comfort zone. For health, find ways to stay in shape that you enjoy doing, and don’t forget your mental health. Connecting with others will change after vaccinations, so start thinking about how you want to get back into the real world. 

And of course, your finances are always important to focus on. Think about how you can reduce debt, increase your income, trim expenses, and invest more wisely. 

Whatever you end up doing this year, have a healthy, happy, and prosperous 2021!