Recently, I have been receiving many questions about how our financial goals have changed since we now are making more income than we used to make. Even Jordann made a post last week titled How to Spend Your Extra Income. We definitely need to adjust our financial goals. This is mainly because of all of the side hustles that I am doing, especially since how last month I made nearly $8,000 in extra income.
The extra income that I have been making from my numerous side hustles is amazing. It allows us to do many things, while also paying down my student loans. Yes, I am busy most of the time, but I am much more comfortable and happy with life. And yes, I could be dedicating all of our leftover money and all of our extra income towards my student loans, but I am a believer of enjoying your money as well. I have a well-thought out plan that will enable us to pay off my student loans extremely early in life, so I should be able to have fun as well!
Below are all things that I want to start working on or finishing completely (in large part due to my extra income) within the next 12 to 13 months. Wish us luck!
Pay off my student loans – Read about my Student Loan Payoff Plan
Because of my side hustles, I am able to put a decent sized chunk towards my student loans every month. Without my extra income, I do think that it would be very, very hard for me to pay off my student loans so quickly. I plan on paying them off in May (as in next month). Yes, yes, I kept saying that this would be done this month, but after calculating how much left I owe, how much we would have left in our emergency fund and everything else, my payoff will be pushed to May. Hopefully my student loans are actually DONE for in the month of May.
Car loans – hmmm
We have two car loans now, but mainly took out the loans to take advantage of super low interest rates. I don’t think we will be paying the car loans off unless we have tons of extra cash around and don’t know what to do with it all. I don’t see the point in not taking advantage of extremely low interest rates where I can invest the cash and most likely receive a better return. I am going to guess that by the beginning of next year, that we will have most things paid off completely (or have the ability to pay things off completely). It will be a great feeling to be saving so much!
Invest more heavily
We invest now, but not by much. Nothing that I would be jumping for joy about. Once my student loans are gone though, I plan on changing that around and start investing more heavily and aggressively. There will most likely be a lot more posts dedicated to investing starting in the summer. How much money do you spend on investments every month? What percentage of your income goes towards investment/retirement, and what type of investments do you have?
Save for a down payment for our next house
Like I’ve said 100 times already, we want to buy a new house eventually. We love our current house, but want to buy a second house (and sell our current home) in order to find a place that we love and can grow into a little more easily. We’re unsure of what city in the area that we want to buy in, what kind of house we want, the style and so on, so there are plenty of reasons why we are waiting instead of rushing our second home purchase.
For the mean time though, the plan is to save, save, SAVE for a down payment. We want to put around 30% down on our next house, and any more than that will be awesome as well. We also want to start saving like crazy to furnish the new house with a lot of new things that we are holding back from buying right now.
Start having more fun
Yes, we are having fun now, but we also feel very cramped with time. As I said yesterday, we are in the process of hiring a landscaping company who will clean up our yard and also mow the lawn every week. This way we will have more time to do more fun things and not feel constantly rushed to do things around the house.
We also want to use the extra income towards traveling. We travel a decent amount, but I would love to increase this and buy some nice camping gear. This girl right here has never been camping… There are a lot of places on the west coast that we would like to visit and camp at as well.
I would also like to dedicate my extra income towards other fun things such as skydiving, getting my pilot’s license and so on. We even have been thinking about buying kayaks lately as well. Just looking for the perfect one! Without extra income, I don’t know if any of this would even be possible. I’m looking forward to spending more time outside. We also need to start thinking about life insurance!
What are you putting your side income towards? What are your financial goals?
What would you do differently than us?
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