Genymoney.ca’s 2023 Personal Finance Resolutions

Happy New Year! Hope you had a restful break during the holidays. Or at least contemplative so you could think and plan how you will manifest 2023 to align with your vision and values.

2023 is going to be great, right?

Here are my 2023 Personal Finance Resolutions. I like sharing my goals because it keeps me accountable.

As I’ve said before, I find financial goals easier to achieve than the regular New Years resolutions, other habits I find harder to improve and I am less disciplined at those habits (e.g. stay off Twitter and stop wasting my time).

MAX OUT TFSA

The 2023 TFSA contribution limit is $6500. This will be an easy goal because it just involves transferring money from my non-registered account into my Questrade TFSA, and this will be done in January 2023 to maximize the magical tax free compounding.

Here’s the total TFSA contribution room if you were of minimum age (age 18) when the TFSA started in 2009. $88,000 is the total contribution room if you had never contributed to your TFSA and are were at least 18 when the TFSA was introduced.

Year	TFSA Contribution Room
2009	$5000
2010	$5000
2011	$5000
2012	$5000
2013	$5500
2014	$5500
2015	$10,000
2016	$5500
2017	$5500
2018	$5500
2019	$6000
2020	$6000
2021	$6000
2022	$6000
2023	$6500
2024	$7000
Total	$95,000

MAX OUT RRSP

As with other years, I’m not sure what my RRSP room will be. This goal will be done once I find out what my RRSP contribution room is from the 2022 Notice of Assessment after my taxes are done.

My RRSP contribution room is on the lower side (typically it is 18% of earned income from the previous year) because of my defined benefit pension adjustment.

In the past I’ve transferred US dividend paying stocks from my non-registered to my RRSP. We’ll see what will happen this year as most of my US dividend paying stocks are already in my RRSP.

INCREASE DIVIDEND INCOME TO $35,000/YEAR

Last year in 2022, my goal was to increase my dividend income to $25,000 per year. To my pleasant surprise, I ended the year with just over $28,790 in passive dividend income annually.

Therefore, in 2023, my goal is to increase the dividend income from $28,700 per year to $35,000 (forward annual yield).

I can’t control what the market does but I can control my contributions (I have cash savings, and I don’t make this much money in order to be able to invest $180,000 in the market for a 3.5% yield, in case you are wondering…hah). Also, thankfully dividend raises occur too!

If I don’t hit my goal, I won’t fuss about it too much because I don’t need the income right now, but focusing on growth would be a bigger deal, which is why I’ll be investing the majority of my money in ETFs that may not have a 3%+ yield.

Work On My 1 Year Goal

My one year goal is to have 7 figures in my investment portfolio.

Assuming a 7% annualized return), my target for the end of the year December 2023 will be around $1,000,000 and this includes contributions to the portfolio which are similar in numbers to the above dividend income goal with reinvested dividends.

My favourite free compound interest calculator is from The Calculator Site.

Passiv recently added a Goals feature to help you achieve this and keep track of your goals- it is pretty much a compound interest calculator broken down by month. You can see what the goals feature looks like here.

One downside is that it only looks at your Questrade accounts and if you have other accounts it doesn’t include it.

Passiv Elite is free if you use Questrade.

READ 5 INVESTING/ PERSONAL FINANCE BOOKS

I enjoy reading non-fiction personal finance and investing books, and I usually pick five investing or personal finance books per year and and write book reviews about them.

The book reviews I write help me remember what I learned from the books, even if they’re not very popular articles on this blog.

Here are the 5 investing and personal finance books that I hope to read and then write about in 2023:

• Investment Biker by Jim Rogers (I liked Adventure Capitalist so much that I want to read his first round the world trip)
• Retirement Income for Life: Getting More Without Saving More by Fred Vettesse
• Beat The Bank: The Canadian Guide to Simply Successful Investing By Larry Bates
• Too Rich to Be Stressed by Dividend John (Dividend John on Twitter is quite the fan of Canadian banks, amassing over $68,000 in annual dividend income from a concentrated Canadian heavy portfolio)
• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert C. Cialdini

Here are other personal finance books and dividend investing books I recommend.

2023 NEW YEARS RESOLUTIONS

I’ll give these a go again since I didn’t get them down right last year.

• Meditation daily for 10 minutes. I was still falling asleep for most of my meditation days, so to prevent this I will sit upright when meditating.
• Continue physical activity 20 minutes four times a week and get some weights. We got some weights in 2022 and was pretty diligent with them for the first half of the year then I got lazy. I’ll make sure I pick up the weights at least once a week and use them. The other times in the week I will do a HIIT exercise/ body weight exercise, or go for a run.
• Time management– Limit Twitter to maximum 45 minutes per day throughout the day. Last year I tried to limit it to 30 minutes but that didn’t work very well. I think my average usage is about 1 hour throughout the day (so embarrassing I know).
• Sleep before 12am– I’ll give this a go again.

Good luck with your 2023 resolutions!

What are some of your New Year’s Resolutions?