{"id":599,"date":"2008-12-30T16:41:05","date_gmt":"2008-12-30T20:41:05","guid":{"rendered":"\/blog\/?p=599"},"modified":"2011-09-19T18:55:07","modified_gmt":"2011-09-19T23:55:07","slug":"goals-for-the-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/?p=599","title":{"rendered":"Goals for the Year"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the beginning of the year, I set a few goals for myself (though I wasn’t quite brave enough to make them public on the blog). In addition to things like making progress on my thesis, I had two major goals. The first was to educate myself about money matters, and to take a more active<\/del> conscious\/purposeful role in monitoring and managing my portfolio. That one I have met in spades, and if anything have gone too far in dabbling in the stock market this year. I think I’ve driven off at least two regular readers because they were bored to tears over the personal finance posts.<\/p>\n

My performance in the market has not been great. For a large part of the year I was down, but down slightly less than the major indexes (go go active management!)… until one of my holdings dropped 99% on very bad news… I’m now down 38% on the year (counting savings through the year as cash at the beginning) which is just about the same as the indexes.<\/p>\n

The other goal was to lose weight and get in shape. My long-term goal is to get back to the weight I was at at the beginning of grad school. At the beginning of the year, I was 40 pounds over that target weight. Of course, it would be unrealistic and unhealthy to lose all that weight in a single year, so my goal for the year was to lose the first 20 pounds. Sadly, I only lost about 15, and then regained 5 so that at the end of the year, I’m just down 10 pounds. Still, that’s progress, and more importantly, I’m in much better shape than I was this time last year. My heart rate and blood pressure are down, and my stamina is up. So overall, I’m pretty happy with how the year has gone.<\/p>\n

I’m keeping my weight loss goal at 20 lbs\/year again for 2009, and that’s in the Wii fit now, so no backing down. As long as I continue to make progress I think I’ll be happy (I figure I’ve got at least three years where I can convince my self-esteem that muscle weighs more than fat).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the beginning of the year, I set a few goals for myself (though I wasn’t quite brave enough to make them public on the blog). In addition to things like making progress on my thesis, I had two major goals. The first was to educate myself about money matters, and to take a more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,16],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=599"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}