Didn’t Meet My Goal, Dealing With Failure
By Pinyo • Feb 5th, 2008 • Category: Financial PlanningLynnae at Being Frugal recently reviewed her 2008 financial goals. She shared some successes and failures, and asked other personal finance bloggers to review theirs. In particular, she referenced my goal to reduce my household utility bill by 10% or $35 a month, and asked, “Did you reduce your bill in January?”
Photo via moregueFile
The short answer is it doesn’t look very good. I am on the level payment plan with both Con Edison for electricity, and Keyspan for natural gas. When I wrote my original goal, I was paying $125 per month for electricity, $175 for gas, and another $50 for water. So far, Keyspan sent me a revised level payment plan of $187 per month, and increase of almost 7%.
What should I do?
Sometimes it’s easy to get upset, and react with emotion. However, that’s not productive, is it? A better way to approach failure is to ask why:
- Why did I fail?
- Did some assumptions or conditions change?
- Was my original goal realistic?
For me, it’s obvious why I was my plan was derailed — and it wasn’t a bad thing. My wife gave birth in December, and her parents came from Thailand to live with us temporarily to help my wife takes care of the baby. As such, we have 3 additional people living with us — her parents and the baby. With four people at the house 24/7, it’s inevitable that the utility bill goes up. Not to mention that we now do more laundry, cook more, and keep the lights on more (my baby doesn’t like it when I turn off the light).
Should I be making any change?
I could do one of three things in face of this failure:
- Do nothing and accept the failure
- Try harder to achieve the goal
- Revise my goal to reflect new assumptions and conditions
For us, there are much to adapt to, so I am not going to push the issue and try to cut the utility bill under the new circumstance. I will continue to monitor the situation and reevaluate the goal in a few months.
Right now, I am just grateful that my wife’s parents came to help us with the baby. I can’t imagine how my wife and I would manage without her mom’s help. Thanks mom!
What about…
Now, it’s my turn to pick on a few other bloggers to do a follow up on their goals:
- Steve from Brip Blap wants to earn $1,000 alternative income per month in 2008. How are you doing with your alternative income? — if you are doing well, please tell us how you did it.
- Mark from TheLocoMono has a goal to create an emergency fund during 2008. How is your emergency fund coming?
- Plonkee from Plonkee Money shares her 2008 Financial Goal to obtain a Chartered status, which is a professional qualification in the UK. What is your progress on this goal, Plonkee?
- Amanda from Me Vs. Debt has a plan to pay down almost $17,000 in debt in 2008! How is your debt elimination coming along?
- Laura from Green Panda Treehouse plans to aggressively pay $700/month towards her car loan bill and pay it off by July 31, 2008. Laura, did you pay $700 in January?
You can visit Cash Money Life to see all the 2008 Financial Resolutions.
This post was featured in:
- The Carnival of Personal Finance #139: Valentine Edition hosted by My Dollar Plan. For more information please visit the Carnival of Personal Finance.
I’m not sure you can call that an absolute failure. It’s true you didn’t meet the goal, but the circumstances have changed. I think you have the option of revising your goal due to the circumstances.
The other thing regarding this goal - utility costs have risen recently. It may be better to compare usage vs. total bill. The same thing applies to driving a car. Your goal could be to spend 10% less on gas this year as opposed to last year. However, if you reduce gas consumption by 10%, but gas prices rise 20%, it may be difficult to reach your goal - even though you set out to do what you wanted, which is decrease overall consumption.
In your case, you consumption most likely increased, but did it increase proportionally to the number of people that increased? That may be a better way to look at it…
I agree that consumption is a better number to judge, and definately consider it across all of the energy bills and compare it to similar circumstances. Our heat is gas but our A/C is electric so theoretically when one drops, the other increases. However, for us summers are much harder on the overall usage than winters and our electricity rates have increased at a much faster rate than gas, so I try to compare seasonal usage to prior years instead of month to month.
Since you’re on a level payment plan, you might also consider how your energy companies calculate the bill. Ours calculates a rolling 12 month average, so even if this month’s usage went down a good bit, the total bill might not if we had a couple of wild months at the end of the summer. I’ve heard of other plans that recalculate once a year based on the prior 12 months, which to me would be much harder to work with.
Thanks for the check-up Pinyo. I need to address that issue.
We all live and learn. I’m glad your family is doing well.
Have you thought about turning down the temperature of your water heater boiler? That’s usually a major power and cost drain. Washing your laundry with cold water helps cut cost as well, not to mention making sure your windows are properly insulated (a simple towel placed on the window sill helps cut down drafts too!
I can see how adding more people would make a huge spike in the bill. But they’re so important for new moms, for their sanity and for assistance.
Perhaps you can look for a few ways to get you closer without putting pressure on people now. And then once they’ve left start figuring out a realistic goal and move towards that…
One thing I have learned in life is that it is okay to walk away in defeat if you know you were victorious in the attempt for walking away does not have to mean you failed, as long as you are willing to return to the battlefield to fight again. For as long as you continue in the attempt, you will end up victorious one day.
Maybe pad the goal now with the baby?
Hi Pinyo,
Here are a few tips I’d suggest:
Make sure your water heater is insulated. There are insulation blankets that you can wrap it in. Also, if and ONLY IF it is an electric water heater, put a one inch piece of rigid foam insulation under it. No one ever thinks to insulate the bottom and it can save you $1 to $2 per month. Sometimes you can get a piece of this rigid insulation for free from a lumberyard or from the scrap heap at a residential construction site. They have dozens of broken pieces.
Caulk your windows and around the doors. Caulk is cheap and it can make a huge difference in the amount of cold air that infiltrates the house.
Make sure your door weatherstripping is working well. It should spring back when compressed and should completely fill all the gaps around the door when it’s closed. You can also door and window weatherstripping pretty cheap at a hardware store or Lowe’s/Home Depot.
If you have a fireplace that isn’t being used. Make sure the flue is closed. You can also tuck some insulation in there if you don’t use the fireplace.
Hardware stores carry a product called “Great Stuff.” It is a foam that, once sprayed, swells to several times its size. Go around your home, looking for potential areas where cold air could get in. The dryer vent, the outside water faucet, gaps in the siding, or places where something comes out of the house (like a pipe) are prime candidates to have Great Stuff sprayed. The product eventually hardens and you can cut it or shave it to look better.
One thing that drives ME crazy when we’re running either the heat or the A/C is for the kids to constantly be opening and closing the doors. I will put a cooler of drinks and some snacks outside in the summer so they don’t come in and out. In the winter, you could insure they have plenty of warm clothing on and possibly have an insulated cup of hot chocolate just outside the door.
If you have ceiling fans, turn them on (low setting) in the winter but have them push the air UP. This causes the warm air at the ceiling to circulate without causing too much of a drafty feeling from a ceiling fan blowing on you.
These are just a few tips and hope they help.
Wow, I really appreciate all the comments and support here. Technically, I haven’t failed yet since I still have about 10 more months to reach my goal — however, I am definitely not pushing the issue because the comfort of 4 people who stay at home is far more important than the few dollars.
@Patrick - Good point. And from environmental impact perspective, measuring usage is more accurate than dollar savings since the prices have been going up — and quite alarmingly I may add. If I do consumption per person, then I am doing great now that we have 8 people at the house.
@SBH - Living in the North East, we are in a similar situation. You’re right about level payment plan making it hard to judge; so my plan may have been flawed from the beginning since I can’t really track my progress effectively (due to annual calculation).
@Laura - I visited your blog. Thank you for following up. Although you didn’t meet your goal, you are not doing badly. Good luck with your career!
@Money Blue Book - Actually I had to turn it up this year! My fancy shower faucet (we renovated) doesn’t have separate hot/cold control, so the old setting “low” was not hot enough on cold days — live and learn.
I think I am going to try the towel idea, or does a better job of insulating the windows. We got our windows installed a few years ago and they are lousy.
@Mrs. Micah - I agree. Right now, their comfort is my top priority. In the end, it’s only a few dollars difference.
@Mark - That’s very philosophical, but you always are…
@Ron - Wow, that’s a great list of tips. One thing I am trying to do is fix the draft. The house is old and the windows are not that great (sadly these are relatively new windows that we installed after we bought the house). Also, the old steam heating system with only 1 thermostat to control the whole 3 floors make it very difficult to make all living spaces comfortable.
The fireplace is already sealed, but I think the door and the foyer could be better insulated.
Again, thank you everyone for the support and suggestions.
HI Pinyo,
Congratulations on the new baby
It sounds like the increase was based on last years spending patterns. You have a the whole year to bring expenses back down. Or not. Maybe you’re right - sometimes goals need to be re-evaluated based on new information. More people in your home will make additional utility expenses unavoidable. I consider looking for ways to adapt to those changes great progress in itself!
Cheers,
Amanda
Pinyo~
Don’t feel too bad about the increase in your utility bill, in spite of your efforts. One of my goals over the past three months has been to reduce both my gas bill and my electricity bill. My gas bill was lowered by about 30%, primarily because I rarely have the thermostat above 58 degrees anymore (can you say “brrrrrrrrrr”?) and I never have it on at night.
I was equally careful with my electricity usage, turning off lights, only using one lamp instead of four to light a room, replacing bulbs with CFL’s, unplugging appliances/electronics during the day/night when not in use. I did succeed in lowering the Kilowatts used—-but my bill actually increased a bit anyway! Why? Because utility rates went up! Grrrrrrr!
I respect your efforts, and wish you the best of luck! I’ll keep checking back to your blog for new updates on 2008 goals. . . . (-:
Great list of tips.
And Pinyo, even thoug babies and some expense…don’t forget the tax break!
it will pay for the extra gas 
I’ve since accepted the fact that with life changing events such as having a kid (or two or more!) that I’d be spending more. I was actually amazed that Nickel is able to cut down costs successfully despite the fact that he has 4 kids to raise. Who’s able to do that? Certainly not most people I know, and certainly not me! I’m from the camp whose expenditures have risen quite a bit since having children.
Kids can be expensive for many reasons — more doctor’s visits with some of those due to more “exotic” reasons. Clothes, school stuff, extra curricular activities will require more outlay of course. Family vacations will need to accommodate more people, you’ll get more visitors to your home courtesy of your kid for sure… Children will often want hobbies, pets, you name it. So if you are to accommodate these extras, then cuts have to happen elsewhere. So far, that hasn’t been something I’ve been successful with. Hence, my acceptance of a bigger budget. Oh well!
Great post!
Goals are important, but that’s what they are there for to have something to aim at. If we miss them then I never get too hung up about it because I think about what I have still acheived (and probably wouldn’t have if i had set the goal in the first place)