Every month I review how I did towards my goals for the previous month and plan out my focus for the next month. Since I do these goal posts monthly, you might want to read them all by checking out the goals category. January was a tough month for trying to accomplish much, but I had a few successes over the 31 days.
January 2018 Goals
My main focus in January was around writing more here on Minafi and starting to develop a habit of creation. It was a bit of an uphill battle for me. Half the month I was out traveling and at conferences. More time was spent continuing to unpack from our move. The main goal I set out for January was this one:
By February 1, 2018, I will have turned Minimal Investor Course here on Minafi into a draft of a paid course that brings great value to those learning how to invest.
I’ve had a lot of fun writing The Minimal Investor Course and turning it an organized course rather than just an email course. It still needs a lot more work, but it’s getting there. I’m starting off with the same organization as the email course, but with additional videos, tests and interactive components.
- 1: Getting Your Accounts in Order
- 2: Understanding Diversification
- 3: All About Fees
- 4: Tax-Efficient Fund Placement
- 5: Making an Investment
- 6: Tracking Your Investment
- 7: Pay Yourself First Mindset
- 8: Tax Implications
- 9: Rebalancing Your Portfolio
- 10: Create Your Own Rules For Investing
Length-wise, the course right now is looking like it will include the following:
- Enough text content to fill a 250-page book.
- There are 6 optional tests throughout the course.
- Three interactive components to help illustrate topics.
- There are 14 videos totaling 90 minutes long.
- Free forever access to the Minafi Slack, and the private Minimal Investor Course Slack channel for questions.
I’m still building out the Minimal Investor Course, but you can get access to it for half off by using the code “EARLYACCESS“! This is the cheapest it’ll ever be ($50!), and should only be purchased if you want to be patient with buying now and waiting a month while I finish it up in February. The course as it stands today contains all of the information from the email course, but that will be supplemented with additional content throughout the month – and as questions come up.
Goals Breakdown
One of the goals I set for myself was publishing three posts a week here on Minafi. While I did hit that goal (:celebrate:!), it hasn’t felt fun. It did humble and dramatically increase my respect for all bloggers who write three posts a week (especially ones that have months forward already written and create Pinterest images – some people are just crazy overachievers). It’s been a big change writing something and not seeing it go out for weeks. I think it’s made my writing better though, as I review my content on a different day from when it’s written.
Create the Initial Draft of the Course
The draft of Minimal Investor Course is ou, with a marketing page and testimonials. Luckily, by having the email course out for months, I’ve been able to get great feedback on it. Some people were kind of enough to provide testimonials that help explain the value the course offers. I’ve been completely humbled by some of the emails and feedback I’ve gotten from people about it. This has included:
- People who inherited money after a loss and connected with my similar story.
- Business/finance majors in college who learned more about investing from this course than their education.
- People who had tried to learn to invest, but struggled, then found this course and things clicked.
I’m excited to get feedback from others about this course and see who else I can reach with it.
Create Interactive Teaching Aids
For the course, and for an interactive page I’m planning here on Minafi, I have a few visualizations planned. One of them involves making the diversification graph interactive. When I learned how to read this chart (well, a better one than that link which is a work in progress), it was one of those “aha!” moments. If I can make that happen for people via an interactive way I think it’ll be memorable and useful.
Another is a visual representation of how fees impact your total portfolio. I’m interested in visualizing the percent of your portfolio eaten by fees over time. It’s crazy to think that if you’re investing with an advisor who charges a 1% fee, and they put you in an investment 1.5% then you’re paying 2.5% in fees (obviously). What’s not obvious though, is that assuming 7% market growth, these fees will eat into a full 50% of your total gains over 30 years! I want to create a visualization to further explore and drive this point home to make it clear how huge impact fees have.
Create Visual Aids
I did not get to start this one at all. I have a tendency to think in words and interactions, but design wise I struggle.
Overall, I give myself about a B- on the month.
How did you do on your January goals?