Annnd..99.89% on my goal of silver for the year. I’m gonna call that 100%.

I was gonna hold off and buy the remaining silver over the next couple weeks but I’ve no idea where the prices are going and I’d rather err on the side of caution and buy it now. I asked a buddy of mine where he thought silver would be on December 31’st and he said “Thirty bucks”. Thing is, will silver have climbed to $30 or will it have dropped to $30. And, no doubt, there’s many an opinion that $30 is a way, way underestimate.

Nonetheless:

• Emergency Fund goal for 2022 – complete
• Silver goal for 2022 – complete
• HSA goal for 2022 – complete

Remaining:

• Roth goal for 2022 – 55.75% complete
• Gold goal for 2022 – 75.89% complete
• Land goal for 2022 – 43.18% complete

How are yours coming?

79.66% of the way to the 2022 silver goal. Once that’s knocked off the list I can wrap up the gold goal for the year and then its balls-deep into getting the land fund fully funded.

And I have to do that in the midst of an inflationary cycle, during a pandemic, during an international crisis, while juggling all my usual responsibilities. But..If I pull it off….well!

Well, I finally unloaded (ha!) the last of that ammo I picked up a few weeks back. So..what to do with the lump of cash that resulted from it? Well, I have goals. I finished my Emergency Fund goal 11 months early and it looks like I just finished my HSA goal ten months early. (By the way, according to journalism standards you write zero to ten as words but any number over 11 can be represented in numerals. Check your AP style guide.)

So, when the Emergency Fund hit its 2022 goals I was able to redirect the planned monthly allocation elsewhere. And now that the HSA is topped off for the year I can re-allocate that funding elsewhere. Most notably into more silver. Goals remaining for year: silver, gold, Roth, and land purchase fund. Probably in that order. Even after capping the HSA for the year I still have enough left over to pick up another five of these, which will go a good ways towards lowering my required monthly purchases to reach my goal.

Fortunately, I’ve spent the last twenty years buying food, guns, ammo, etc, etc, so there really isn’t much else for me to buy in regards to preparedness….except, of course, for that Big Chunk O’ Nowhere. Still working on that.

I may have mentioned it, but my basic goalsetting paradigm is to increase whatever it is .. gold holdings, silver holdings, HSA balance, Roth balance, Emergency Fund balance, etc…by 50% from the previous year. In the last year or two, that’s become a tall order, obviously, as those balances increase. But, in the last year or two I’ve also been making more money…so I’ve been able to keep up with my rather unreasonable goals. In a few years, though, I’ll probably have to start stepping it down in order to keep things realistic. Maybe shave off 5% every year…increase things by 45% next year, 40% after that, 35% after that, etc. We’ll see.

I’m fortunate in that I’ve paid off the vehicle, house, debts, etc, and pretty much have no debt load to suck down money that would otherwise be free to use elsewhere. Also, I’m pretty cheap. As a result, I can chunk a rather large percentage of my income into things like metals and mutual funds. Part of it is just dumb luck and part of it is living a life of priorities. But, the final result is all the same… a bit better financial security than almost half of the population.

It’s often overlooked, but preparedness is about more than being prepared for a big crisis. Its also about being prepared for when there isn’t a crisis.

Y’know, it’s not easy to  open up a new post in WordPress and come up with something worth writing. (This, of course, flatters myself because it presumes that stuff up to this point has been worth writing.) Yet, here we are….so, let’s see what vaguely surivival-oriented topic we can beat to a slow death today.

Since it’s a three day weekend for me, I have an extra day to try and get stuff done that I normally would not have a chance to get at during the week. So what am I doing, mostly just regular household chores. But, in the midst of all that I had a Zoom call with someone and we were discussing guns. I mentioned that, by and large, I’ve really hit the point where I don’t really need more guns. Oh, there’s stuff I want…no doubt. But if the apocalypse happened today? Yeah, I’d be orders of magnitude past ‘just fine’.

The interesting thing is, that didn’t happen on purpose. Oh, it did in the sense that I didn’t somehow pick up dozens of guns without knowing it. It just means that for most of my gun-acquiring years there was no real set plan. It was only a few years back that I came up with the Magic Number of what I wanted. By then it was a pretty simple thing to round off what I already had and pretty much close out the Must Have For TEOTWAWKI list.

Whats worth noting here is that up to a certain point, I was taking a very undisciplined approach towards gun buying…see gun, buy gun. Without a specific idea of what I wanted, how many I wanted, etc, there was no real goalpost to run towards. It wasnt until after I set a goal that I was able to achieve gun-nirvana and say “Ok, done.”

I know it sounds like self-improvement BS, but it really is true: if you want to actually achieve a goal you need to follow the criteria of how to set it. Just saying “I wanna …..” isn’t enough. Here’s a short description of how, ideally, you should set goals.

And, as it turns out, it’s true. I had some very loose financial goals and I never seemed to hit them. Starting in late 2019 I opened up a spreadsheet, marked off 12 columns with one month in each, and started keeping track of exactly how much I was trying to achieve and I was progressing at it. And…I hit all my yearly goals early. Way early. I’m not saying that to brag, I’m saying that because I found something that works for me and it may very well work for you if you’re having trouble hitting your goals.

Whether the goal is five AR’s in the safe by Christmas, six months of food in storage by Thanksgiving, or a new-to-you truck by next summer, try setting your goals in a more concrete manner as outlined above. Worst thing that happens is you don’t make progress any better than you are now.

As an aside, my goals at the moment are:

• Double my emergency fund by 12/31/22
• Double my HSA by 12/31/22
• Increase my Roth by 50% by 12/31/22 (mostly through active trading by yours truly)
• Double my silver stash by 12/31/22
• Have enough in my ‘Buy a piece of middle of nowhere’ fund by 12/31/22 to do just that
• Increase my work compensation by 25% by end of 2022

We shall see how it goes. The next couple years will be full of opportunity for savvy and bold people. Sad but true, opportunities come from bad times and other peoples bad fortune. :::shrug::: Circle of life, baby. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to take advantage of some things (the coming magazine bans, for example) to achieve my goals. We’ll see. In the meantime don’t just say what your goals are…get it into a spreadsheet or something, in a quantifiable and recordable manner, and start making incremental progress.

So….that happened……..

No, not the Glock, ya goober. I figured I had passed my finals and graduated but I wasn’t going to be certain until I got the stupid diploma in the mail. And….there ya go. I guess it’s time to go get the grownup job now. (Which, as it turns out, wasn’t nearly as difficult to find as I thought.)

For those of you who are curious, its a Bachelors of Science in Amateur Gynecology with a minor in Lingerie Stress-testing. Exams were tough but the practical course was fun.

Financial goalkeeping continues for 2021. I finished off my desired annual goal for my emergency fund. That means that in the first three months of 2021 I hit my anual goals for my Roth, HSA, Emergency Fund, and silver stash. Next years goals will be to increase them all by 50%.

Since I’ve met those goals, I can now loosen up with my personal spending but, really, I’ll probably keep throwing money into things and get a head start on 2022’s goals. Not many people complain about saving too much money.

Just as well because with the current administration in charge, I have serious reservations about the economy. You don’t just manufacture $1.9 trillion and think it isn’t going to tip the inflationary scales a bit. “But Zero..if you believe an inflationary period is coming, then having money in the bank is the last thing you want!”, I hear you cry. This is true. This is why I won’t put all of whatever ‘extra’ money I have into cash in the bank (in the gun safe). It’ll go in the bank, in the gunmakers pocket, in the gold coin shops coffers, and in WinCo’s cash registers. And…perhaps…some landowners bank account?

It’s probably time to start putting away cash towards that ultimate survivalist must-have: a chunk of middle o’nowhere. That’s gonna be a serious amount of financial wrangling. But…hard to be a paranoid, right-wing, gun-crazed survivalist without a nice home in the boonies for people to label as ‘a compound’. Fortunately, of all the states in this fractured union, Montana probably has the most amount of realtors who don’t bat an eye when someone wants a piece of real estate that is inaccessable in winter, remote, and far from the madding crowd.