Hello friend! Let’s talk about New Year Planning with your family. It’s a great time to sit down, dream big, realize reality, and work towards goals. Everyone has different goals, but I can provide you with a general list of categories and questions to discuss with your family/loved ones. I’ve always been a planner, so when my husband, Kevin, offered to plan with me, my heart soared! I truly don’t take for granted the fact that my husband has similar goals and morals as me; it’s a blessing.
1. Pick the Location & Get Ready
This year, our kids were visiting my parents for a fun sleepover over Christmas break and Kevin and I knew it was a great time to sit down and do some planning. You can be as casual or as formal as you’d like in these meetings. This year’s was very casual and cozy. We were sitting on our living room sofa, fireplace roaring, with laptops on our lap.
2. Start with Reflection Questions
We started with a Google document, so both of us could edit in “real-time.” The first part of our discussion was what happened this past year. Here are some questions you can ask to get the discussion going:
- What went well this past year? Did you get a new pet, home, job? Was your child successful in potty training? Did your child get improved marks in school? etc.
- What didn’t go well this past year? Did you have an unexpected injury? Did the cost of living increases impact your savings/plans? etc.
- Are there any potential risks or expenses coming up in the new year? How is your water heater doing? What about your vehicle’s tires? Health expenses? etc.
- What is a list of wants you’d like for the new year? A new laptop? A new gym membership?
- What is a list of upcoming needs for the new year? Again, this could be similar to 3, but perhaps you know your tires need replacing (ours do…), annual vet appointments, etc.
3. Discuss Main Categories, Determine Your Goals and Action Items
After the list above is complete, we discuss and decide what we want to include in our yearly plan. This year, our categories were as follows:
- Faith
- Home
- Health
- Kids / Family
- Dogs (Pets)
- Financial
- Parenting
- Marriage
- Education (children AND adults)
- Vacations
Each category had two sections next to it with “Goals” and “Action Steps” to help achieve the goal.
In each category, we came up with goals that would improve said category. For instance, for “Faith,” Kevin and I already are in the Read the Bible in Year plan from last year, but we are continuing into this year, along with adding “Family Faith Time,” which will be a weekly devotion that is easily understandable for our family and daughters to discuss. We also included our church attendance goals.
For our whole planning session, it took us about 2-2.5 hours. Our Google doc also only has two pages of info. Having these two pages to look back on during our monthly check-ins will help us see if we are really keeping our goals alive or if we just threw though out the window. lol.
A couple of tips:
- Choose an attainable number of goals. You most likely most be successful if you overwhelm yourself and your family with too many goals.
- Make sure your goals are SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound). Your brainstorming may have been vague, but your goals need to be as specific as possible to be actionable to achieve success.
A quick note: Our yearly expenses are pretty stable (except for cost of living increases) so we didn’t have to physically go through our finances and see what things would cost. That saved us a lot of time. If however, your expenses are not stable, I highly recommend you take a deep dive and see how you can stabilize, reduce, or at least plan them out per month. Remember to be honest in your conversations and always keep an open mind about options. For example, I love getting Starbucks iced tea and Kevin loves Starbucks espresso. A few years ago, we looked at the amount we were spending on Starbucks and we hated the number. We decided to get ourselves a higher-end espresso machine and even in the short run it saved us money AND time. Win-win!
4. Complete Your Calendar Planning
In addition to goal setting & action items, we also look through our calendar for holidays, days off of school (our girls go to a local Christian School so closing days are not usually as typical as the local Public schools), birthdays, our anniversary, vacations, visits to non-local family, volunteer days, potential date nights, potential kids activities, etc.
It’s a great time to grab all those schedules and make sure everyone is on the same page. Our daughters (ages 5 and 7 at the time of this writing) are even included on many of the calendar events I set since we also have a shared family calendar. They get to see the shared items on their iPads when they have screen time on the weekends. (On a different post, I’ll possibly share how we monitor and lock out the “bad” from their iPads).
5. Schedule a Check-In
Making goals is great and all, but you need to be accountable for completing them. It’s up to you and your family to decide when you’d like to check in, but it’s a must to do so!
6. Celebrate!
You’ve done some great planning to make next year great! As parents, life, including the most important things, can get away from us quickly. Taking the time to reflect on last year and plan out the coming year helps us to be more present during the year ahead. And that’s really what we’re all trying to accomplish, right?! 🙂
