2013 Goals

Since another year is in the books, its time to make new goals for 2013.  I've had some of these in the back of my mind for a while now, so I wanted to get them down here.  As last year, I'm sure they'll sort of change and evolve as the year goes on, as the market can change dramatically over time.  I'm obviously not going to let these goals get in the way of good financial sense, but I will do my best to accomplish them.

1.  Buy a House.  This isn't exactly new; I've been looking for a place since September.  I guess the goal here is to buy something that makes financial sense without going overboard, but still getting a good place to live.  I live in the North East in a pretty expensive area; money doesn't go very far when buying a home.  I have a pretty sizable down payment saved up, I'd like what I have saved to cover at least 20% of the cost of the house.  At the same time, I don't really want a place that's going to require me to put in a lot of money to make it livable.  Hopefully I'll be able to get this done sometime in the first half of the year.

2.  Contribute to my roth IRA.  I plan on doing this as early as next week.  Unfortunately, its not as easy as writing a check and dropping it off at the broker's office; I think my adjusted gross income is over the limit for a 2012 roth contribution.  In a nutshell, I plan on contributing to a non-deductible IRA and then converting it to a roth.  I'll post here on how it goes.  As far as what I'll invest it in, I will probably go with monthly paying, higher yielding dividend stocks.  As I receive and accumulate these dividends, I plan on using those to purchase fairly priced, lower risk dividend growth stocks (PG, T, INTC, etc.).

3. Plans for my taxable dividend investing:
a.  Diversify.  If you look at all of my 2012 purchases, most of them (especially in the beginning of the year) were in the same few stocks (LINE, CLMT, ERH).  This isn't to say that I regret my decisions to buy those stocks, its just that I certainly realize the risk I'm taking with only having a few stocks.  I think only owning a few things is fine when first starting out, but now I've been taking this seriously for a while, and its time to branch out some.
b.  March/June/September/December dividends.  Keeping with the diversification trend, I would like to try and focus on investing in companies that pay in the months I have listed here, as those months are my smallest payouts.  Again, I'm not going to invest in companies just because they pay in these months, nor am I going to invest in companies that pay in these months in favor of a better-valued stock that pays in another month, it would just be something I'd like to do if possible.  By the end of the year, I would like to be receiving $700 a month in dividends in these months by March 2014.
c.  Total dividends.  As of right now, I am projected to make $22,234.17 in non-roth IRA dividends for 2013.  By this time next year, my goal is that I am projected to be making $26,000 in non-dividend income.  I realize that this is an extremely aggressive goal, but I am confident that in addition to the money I'm going to put into my account to invest each month that my dividends will continue to grow.  Last year I set a goal to make 2K more in dividends than I did in 2011 (from 18K to 20K) and I blew that number out of the water by May.  This goal will be a lot tougher than the one I set last year, but I'm confident that I'll be able to hit it.

Well, those are my financial goals for 2013.  Wish me luck!  I'll be interested in reading everyone else's 2013 goals.