Kind of funny that even before I knew what the heck I was doing as far as actually have a job or planning out my retirement, I’ve always one financial goal for myself that I’ve kept in the back of my mind, but never put it down on paper err keystrokes and I think I’ve only shared it with one other person. I’ve never really been one to set goals for myself and goals such as saving $100,000 in principal by age 30 for retirement have come as a result of creating this blog and me looking for an excuse to have goals just like all the other bloggers had.

This other goal that I have I didn’t plan nor think about, it just popped in my head one day and well it has stuck around. I’m kind of embarressed to even mention it, because technically it (I think) is not that important to me, but again it’s always sitting there in the back of my mind nagging at me all this time, so I figured what the heck let’s get it out there and analyze it.

I don’t know when I first thought of it or why I thought of it, but I figured once I was done with high school, college, etc. and actually had to get one of those “job” things, how would I know if I was successfull or not? In all other parts of my life before this I could judge if I was on the right track pretty easily. In sports I either started on varsity, our team won conference, went to state, etc. In school I could always take a look at my GPA and know whether or not the effort (or lack there of) I was putting for was paying off. But what the heck do you do for the next 40 years of your life when you are working, how do you really know if you are making any progress? What if 10 years down the road it turns out you are actually failing at work, how do you know? (I guess you could technically get cut 🙂 )

Well maybe I am too narrolly focused, but the only way I could think of to judge yourself was by how much money you made. I had gone to a pretty reputable college and was majoring in a pretty lucrative profession (computer science) and so I figured if I was making $100,000 a year or more by age 30 I would probably be doing pretty good. Now part of the reason I don’t mention it is because even at the time I knew that was somewhat of a stretch for my profession. I’d have to be really successfull or come up with ideas for extra revenue streams (start side companies, etc).

Well I came out of college making $45k a year and 2 years later was all the way up to $47k, I decided I was very undervalued and tried to position my case for a raise. Despite what to this day I thought was an extremely compelling case for a raise, the cards weren’t in my favor at that company and I was very unlikely to get a signifigant pay boost any time soon. So I decided to switch jobs and within a month or so I landed a new job making $56k a year and well coming up on two years later I’ve made it all the way up to $57k a year. So as you can see I’ve been failing pretty miserably at my “secret goal”.

I’ve got less than 3 years to add an extra $43k to my bottom line (a 75%+ increase in salary). Eek 🙂 Now I do have a few things working my favor.

1) I graduated with my MBA (Masters of Business Administration) a little under 2 years ago

2) I am probably about $10-$15k under market for someone in my area with my qualifications (excluding the MBA – a programmer with an MBA isn’t very common)

3) The job I am currently at has tremendously advanced my skillset and I feel much more confident in the value I can bring to a prospective employer, before this I didn’t really know why a company should hire me other than I knew how to code.

Irregardless it’s a pretty daunting feet and even if I do all of the things right that are in my control there is a very good chance that I could still fall incredibly short of that goal, but I suppose now that I actually wrote it down and know that people will make fun of me when 3 years down the road I’m still 40k short it will motivate me to get my act in gear.

Anyway this is a very “soft” goal as while making $100k a year sure would be a nice thing, it’s not something I actually need to support my family, plan for an early retirement, put my kids through college, etc. At same time if I do have the skills, talents, and education to make it happen I probably owe it to myself to give it a decent effort.

So mark my words 2 years 11 months I’ll be pulling in 6 figures 🙂