Expectations for my 44th year.

Ok, with my birthday celebrations with my family over and the presents all opened, the next step would be to start thinking about what I hope to achieve next year. There are some complications with goal setting this time round, but these might be good problems to have :

a) Learning Goals.

My learning goals are complicated by the fact that next resolutions were met before 2018 ended. Flush with some earned income, I was able to attend one Improv class and a 2 hour primer on looking after my voice.

The Improv class was fun and possibly more useful for my D&D game sessions but it does not really have synergies with my new training career. I told some friends who were interested that I would join them for subsequent classes but only for social reasons.

Voice acting probably made much more sense for me right now given that I make money with my voice so much. The investment is non-trivial though and I've narrowed down my choices to two instructors.

Becoming more persuasive is likely to play a major role in 2019. I have started reading Robert Cialdini's Pre-suation seriously with a view of directly refining my sales message.

b) Investing Goals

Investing will not play a major role at least in the first half of 2019. I expect to go on heavily on the defensive and expect my portfolio losses to be 30% of the losses faced by the DOW. Beyond the bespoke portfolio built in my ERM Masterclass, I expect to go heavy on investments like Netlink Trust, Keppel Infrastructure Trust and, very possibly a very much diminished APTV Trust.

Maybe in 2H 2019, things will start to turnaround.

At this stage everything turns on having a successful career and earned income to do some bottom fishing in the next 6 months.

c) Career Goals

The price to pay for being a trainer is that I no longer have a predictable income. I will need to continually improve my materials to reach the highest earned income ever in 2019. This is going to be one of the hardest goals I ever set in my life because I can't even foresee how I am able to meet it even tough I can somehow smell this coming into 2019.

Another difficult objective i need to meet is to find another course to teach, likely legal in nature so that it can complement my financial courses. This makes it imperative that I find a smaller law firm to hang my coat and possibly do some legal practice on a locum basis. Right now, I don't even know where to start, if you are a lawyer friend reading this and know of a law firm that can accept a legal professional who can practice on a locum basis let me know - I do expect that my pipeline of contacts who need legal support should expand significantly so that I can do some rain-making work and bring revenue to a law firm. What I cannot do, however,  is to be stuck in a legal office and do work on-demand by my firm.

d) No easy way

As a collective I am definitely more confident of meeting my learning and investing goals than my career goals. I am entering this strange territory of having a portfolio-based career, finding the most efficient use of my time based on who needs the work the most.

One major positive complication is that at the back of my head, I believe that I have a financial course targetted at Milllenials that contain material not covered by anyone before. This is something I will build into a short 30 minute presentation that will be launched with Seedly in March 2019. A lot depends thereafter on whether Milllenials are willing to give me enough feedback to turn it into a compelling course for folks in their 20s and 30s.

Powering all this is, of course, my passive income that generates a level of predictability for my family. This allows me to go on long periods of time without pay allowing me to work long lengths of time for a satisfying pay-off.