Dear friends

A quarter of the year 2009 is about to come and go and I’ve decided to do a quarterly update on what’s happening in terms of my major projects in financial freedom.

I reviewed, back in 2008, what I had achieved as a means to reflect on the lessons learnt. I also stuck my neck out a little to offer my plans for 2009.

Recap: Road Map for 2009

I set up a mission and vision statement for Five Cents Ten Cents:

Vision: To empower individuals towards financial freedom, one realistic step at a time.

Mission: To be the preferred online personal finance resource in Singapore, through sharing of knowledge, building of skills and fostering a community of financially free individuals.

In terms of mission, I believe the sharing of knowledge has continued through the various posts I’ve written and I’m moving more into “How-to” type of posts to help build skills for those of you who are interested in the techniques you can use. The building of a community takes time and so far I’ve gotten involved in the moneybanter forum which takes time to slowly build up momentum. I also frequent hardwarezone forum on money to share my posts there as well.

Let me drill down to the specific objectives I set for 2009:

1) Improve Useability (Target: March 2009 June 2009)

This was imposed on me by as my webhost gave me quite a fair bit of problems that I decided to switch to the current host and make a template change. So far, I’ve received a couple of feedback that this design is cleaner than my previous one which was getting cluttered.

Useability is an important component of whether people who come back to your blog. I’ve learnt a lot from Danny Choo whose blog attracts millions of visitors. Even a successful blogger cum internet entrepreneur is constantly tweaking his user interface for maximum effectiveness, what more an aspiring financial freedom blogger like myself?

2) Themed Posts and Series (Target: January 2009 – 1st Series to be published) Done!

I’ve managed to start the following themed (series) posts, “Budgeting for Baby”, “Financial Freedom Project”, “Blog Monetisation” and installed a series plugin for my blog. In this regard, this target was set up for easy success as it was an extension of what I was already doing.

3) Stories and Parables (Target: March June 2009 – 1st story/parable post to be published)

In terms of personal stories, I’ve added some but parables still elude me as it requires a fair degree of imagination and time to think up of them.  Will continue to work on this for 2009.

4) Panzer’s Guide to Financial Freedom Book II (April 2008)

This project is starting to excite me a lot as it has been on my mind for most of 2009. The positive responses I’ve received for my first book “Panzer’s Guide to Financial Freedom” which is distributed free in pdf format has encouraged me a lot to pursue this second book.

I’ve decided to name this “Panzer’s Road Map to Financial Freedom” as it ties in how I’ve described this quest for financial freedom as a journey. I am working on it more actively now over weekends since I’ve until the end of April to meet my own deadline!

Review Your Goals

This exercise has been useful in that I hold myself accountable to the goals I have for this blog. Also, it’s easy for me to track my progress so far. As you can see, I’ve not achieve all my objectives but I am still feeling positive as I’ve made strides in most of them and completed one early!

The power of setting goals is that you give your mind targets to work towards. These targets are consciously and subconsciously worked into you and you tend to align your day-to-day actions towards them.

How has been your goal setting and achievement been for 2009?

Share with Panzer in the comments section.

Be well and prosper.

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