How To Make Investing Fun – Our Milestone Rewards

The other night my wife and I decided to stay up late and figure out how we can make our journey to financial freedom fun. We worked on this for hours and didn’t finally go to bed until 11 p.m. Yes, that’s late for us these days. What we came up with is that we would celebrate at each milestone with something, whether that’s a vacation or some material item.

This idea originated from my wife (I think she just really wants a vacation to Bora Bora…) and I think it’s a great idea. Our journey to reaching financial freedom is a long and slow process, and anything we can do to make it a bit more fun along the way seems like a great idea. Basically, we worked hard each month trying to save money and build up additional streams of income, and then once we reach a milestone, we can reward ourselves with something. Below is what we came up with.

How To Make Investing Fun

Net Worth Milestones:

We started at $325,000 as our next goal because our current net worth is around $310,000 as of September 2017.

• $325,000 – Melting Pot. This is one of our favorite restaurants. There’s something amazing about the giant pot of cheese you get at the beginning and the giant pot of chocolate you get to finish it off. We try to go here once a year for a big celebration (such as our anniversary or a birthday present). We’re both pretty excited to hit this milestone and plan to be as frugal as we can until we get it!
• $350,000 – Concert. We both love going to concerts! We recently went to see Eli Young Band and will probably do another country band when he hit this milestone. EDIT: We went to a Breaking Benjamin concert to celebrate this milestone!
• $375,000 – Stay overnight in a hotel. For people without kids, this would hardly seem like something you would put as a net worth milestone. But for people with kids, they will totally understand. The biggest challenge here is we would need to find someone to watch the kids overnight.
• $400,000 – Vacation to Florida. We have gone to Florida a few times since we’ve gotten married, but now with two kids it’s been difficult to imagine that 10 hour drive from Dallas. Now we’ll be forced to go spend a week on the beach. Estimated cost – $2,000 for a week.
• $425,000 – Finish home decorations. We have been putting this one off forever. There’s probably 500 things my wife would like to do to make our home look nicer.
• $450,000 – Vacation to a tropical destination. Not much else to say about this one, who doesn’t want to go to Bora Bora?
• $475,000 – New couch. We’ve had our couches since we got married and the kids have pretty much destroyed them. We want to upgrade what we have to a sectional for the living room.
• $500,000 – Re-do the back patio. This is easily the most expensive item for us. We want to extend our back patio out and build in a grill area. We haven’t gotten an official estimate on the cost to do all this, but I estimate it’s in the $8,000-$10,000 range.

Side Income Milestones:

Our side income currently consists of my wife’s wine business and this blog. We plan to build more streams of income, but want to really focus on growing both of these first. In order for us to celebrate one of the these milestones, we have to hit that number for 3 months consecutively. So if during month 1 and month 2 we achieve $55 in side income, but in month 3 we only achieve $49, we have to start over. The point is that we’re building consistent income on the side.

There’s a chance we could blow these numbers out of the park quickly with my wife’s business able to make a lot more than this blog will make initially, but it seems like a good idea to start small just in case.

• $50/month – Family Frozen Yogurt Night. Something small to start us off, plus I think my wife was just craving some Fro-Yo when suggesting this one.
• $100/month – Date night out. This is fairly vague on purpose. This could be dinner and movie, or just dinner, or going out with some friends to a bar.
• $150/month – New grill. My grill has been ruined since a hail storm came through last year. Although this is basically just for me, my wife will get to benefit some with more steaks.
• $200/month – Shopping spree. New clothes for both of us!
• $250/month – Celebration party. Throw a party to celebrate the growth we’ve achieved and to grow relationships with the people we care about most.

We plan to add and update this list as we achieve these milestones! What do you think about how we’re making investing fun?