Welcome to our 2019 year in review!
This year brought us another year closer to our long-term goals while pushing the limits of what we can possibly accomplish with the time we had available. Another wonderful year of dancing, a big push to create new things, and digging deep to keep on track.
Itโs fun to look back and check things off our list that we accomplished, but itโs also interesting to see the things we wanted to do and either failed at or just didnโt get to attempt.
We never have official goals on the books, but always know there are things we want to accomplish and focus on throughout the year. This year it was a blend of a few things.
Create, Build, Balance
Without further adieu, here’s how our year stacked up in terms of what we felt we got accomplished and what we missed the bar on.
Business & Blog Goals
1) Start a side business.
Win. After a few years of wanting to get something off of the ground, we pushed hard this year and finally created a new YouTube channel! We actually ended up starting two at the same time. It’s been a lot of work! While our focus is still being dialed in, this new venture gave us a lot of experience in video content creation and all the tools and skills necessary to make it high quality.
If you haven’t, be sure to subscribe to our new YouTube Channel. We’d love for you to join us!
2) Post more frequently on Seeking Saturdays.
Win. With our new push to create content for the YouTube Channel, we made sure to accompany every video with a blog post to go along with it. Sometimes it’s tough to balance all of the work that goes into creating videos and blogs, but we’re constantly working to make them both high quality.
Personal Finance Goals
3) Max out our 401ks & IRAs.
Win. We had another great year of pushing ourselves to max out our 401ks. In addition, to make sure our IRAs are optimized for taxes, we decided to push funding them to the following year before tax time to make sure they’re optimized for either traditional or roth.
4) Keep an emergency fund and earn higher interest on it.
Semi-Win. We always try to keep an emergency fund available because life happens. We can’t predict the future and want to have confidence that we have options. We might be confronted by a major house repair, a big recession could put our jobs in jeopardy, or something else we haven’t planned. Since we want this available for emergencies, we don’t put it at risk investing it in the stock market, but instead a savings account.
With the previous year of higher interest rates, we were at least making a little from our online bank at 2% interest, but after the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates several times throughout the year, we had to settle for a smaller 1.6%. We could lock it up in CDs but since the rates aren’t much better, we were more comfortable with an online bank.
5) Pay down a little extra on our mortgage.
Win. After another year of stock market gains and hitting all-time highs, instead of investing extra money in the stock market, we felt comfortable making a couple more small dents in our mortgage balance. Since our interest rate is super low, at this point we’re actually pretty comfortable keeping our mortgage and not paying it off any earlier.
The biggest reason we’ve been in a rush to pay it down over the years is having the margin of safety of lower expenses. It’s exciting to think that one day we’ll have our house paid off. The light at the end of the tunnel is getting brighter. Yay!
Personal & Self-Improvement Goals
6) Continue improving and becoming skilled in dancing.
Win. One of our ongoing goals in life like the previous years is being able to skillfully dance to any kind of music. This means being proficient in a wide variety of dance styles from Latin, ballroom, swing, hip hop, and more. Imagine attending any event in the world and being able to move and connect to the music. It’s a skill that can make traveling even more enjoyable to connect to locals. We still have a long way to go, but we now have several styles of music covered! Latin dancing will always be our favorite though. ๐
7) Get back to gymnastics flexibility and restart yoga.
Fail. Like in previous years, I’ve always felt my best when I’m limber. It gives full range of motion and makes me feel much younger. But this year, I didnโt fit it in. I lost a bit more flexibility since I haven’t been stretching in the morning. Our Latin dancing takes us late into the night so we have to sleep in to recover. Hopefully one day we’ll be able to fit this back into our routine.
8) Simplify stuff in our house and our life (donate, recycle, & sell).
Semi-Win. Minimalism is an ongoing process as stuff is constantly trying to come into our lives. While we definitely donโt consider ourselves minimalists, moving a bit in that directly is always refreshing. We’ve made strides in reducing the amount of stuff we have and, in turn, need to maintain. Sarah had gone through a huge purging of items after reading Marie Kondo’s Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.
This year in our kitchen we actually removed a cabinet from one of the walls and replaced it with two open shelves! Taking down a cabinet meant we had less storage space so it forced us to downsize. Sometimes the best way to declutter is not to add more space, but subtract. It makes the kitchen feel more open and inviting.
9) Continue learning Spanish.
Win. While we havenโt moved onto fluently speaking to our friends in Spanish, Iโve continued my progress in Duolingo. I missed one day a year or so ago but have been practicing for probably over 1200 days! Whoah! I do find that I’m not progressing as much as in the beginning, but it’s more of a maintenance of what I already know. Itโs fun being able to understand parts of our Latin friends’ conversations, read Facebook posts, and understand a little of what the music we’re dancing to is saying.
If you want to fast-track your intro to learning a new language like we did, to get started we used the tremendously popular free app Duolingo. <— Give it a try! Download it on your phone.
Travel Goals
10) Take a week long trip to either a tropical destination like Key West, a cruise, or north to the mountains.
Win! We had originally started planning a trip to Maine to Bar Harbor to visit Acadia National Park, but that plan fell through with the weather. Coincidentally we were presented with an offer from a friend that we couldn’t pass up. She invited us to stay with her for a week down in Key West for Fantasy Fest. Since we launched our YouTube Channel and were basing it around travel, it was the perfect opportunity to enjoy a beautiful place, experience a unique event, and film a handful of episodes all while hanging out with a good friend. Sometimes everything falls into place at once.
11) Take a nice, multi-day backpacking trip.
Fail. We would really love to take at least one multi-day backpacking trip every year, but life had other plans for us. 2020 is another year!
Update from 2018
It felt like 2019 returned a little of the happiness that 2018 had stolen from us. In the previous year, Sarah’s grandpa was moved around to several assisted facility centers of questionable quality after life-altering brain surgery. It was an eye-opening experience and reinforced our urgency to save for the future. Fortunately, he settled into a very nice place and is doing much better.
Sarah is doing well at her company which makes life overall a little happier. Our YouTube channels and blogs have been well received and having exciting projects to work on that we believe in gives us something to look forward to.
Build, Create, Balance
The theme for this year was to push hard while trying to keep everything in balance. Build something new, work hard to create a lot of content, and then try to balance working full-time jobs and part-time dancing on top of trying to get enough sleep to function. Sigh.
It was a challenge but we’re managing.
Dance
Like in our 2018 Year in Review, we continued making a huge number of rich connections within our Latin dancing community. We love the feeling that comes with helping others. It feels good seeing people progress in their skills, especially knowing you might have played even a small role along their journey! We didn’t teach as much this year since the restaurant we taught at once a week closed down, but it freed up time to work on our other projects.
Our community continues to grow and evolve with people constantly coming into and going out of our life. The mosaic of memories we create in one year alone feels like years or even a lifetime. Every week is a celebration of friendship, learning, and embracing the special moments but knowing more good times are yet to come.
New Projects
For years we’ve wanted a side project that we could build to bring in a small side income. In the beginning of the year, we decided this would be the year and by July we had launched two YouTube channels! They’re two unrelated channels that are starting off small but will hopefully grow as we improve our skills in videography and editing along with upgrading equipment to make each video better.
One massive upgrade we’ve been having a ton of fun with is being able to finally smooth out video with our new GoPro Hero 8 Black. What a dream come true it’s been!
Financial Independence
It’s been a long road, but the dream of FI is still alive and well. We keep saving hard to our goals and keep climbing the mountain. Hopefully 2020 will be another year of saving hard for our future.
Exciting Times Ahead
With a trifecta from the richness that dance brings into our life, combined with our ambitious new projects, and along with our long-term financial goals, we’re excited and hopeful for the future. We have a lot of plans for 2020 to come!
It’s our fourth year of updates and we can say this has been the best year so far! Check out our previous years:
- 2018 Year in Review // Learn, Endure, Reflect
- 2017 Year in Review // Connect, Learn, Dream
- 2016 Year in Review // Focus Priorities & Renewal
Hopefully 2020 will bring more memories of a lifetime, rich friendships, learning, health, and wealth to keep us charging forward on our journey.
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