I don’t know about anyone else, but Britton and I like to set goals. In order to set goals you need to be pretty specific otherwise you can just ignore them and say you “sorta” accomplished them or you can procratinate and say you’ll get to them later (but never do). Goals certainly can be changed if you decide you no longer like the direction you are heading or your values change along the way. But if you really want something, you will need to plan out a strategy to get there.

Welcome to Rincon!

Britton and I have talked about our five year goal (and beyond). We had made a five year plan back when we got married in 2005 that we would buy a house in Puerto Rico. While we are technically a little later than our goal timeframe, I’d say we did pretty good with that goal. In those five years not only did we get to our end large goal, but we also set ourselves up with a source of income when we get there permanently by purchasing four rental properties (in addition to our personal house that we bought in 2003). I’d say we have accomplished quite a bit!

So when we started setting up our plan and goals for the next five years they seemed very large and daunting to take head-on, but are not so bad when we break it down into parts just as we did over the last five years. The end goal is to: live in Rincon permanently. Obviously we can still travel and go back to Colorado to visit family and our rentals or go to South America to climb Machu Pichu or Europe for castle adventures, spend the holidays in Italy or go wherever our hearts desire, but we want to call Puerto Rico “home” and to be as comfortable with “home” there as we are with our home in Greeley.

Ok, so to get to that end within 5 years (or hopefully less) this is what we want to do if we want to do it with all the frills.

–Pay off our short-term personal loans we used to purchase property (1st year -this year by June 2012)
–Fix up the existing studio cabana (1st year -by June 2012)
–Tear down the wooden house (1-2 years) (by June 2013)
–Build a couple (2-3) of small cabanas on the property that we can rent out to people as another form of income.  (2-3 years) (by June 2014)
–Build a larger house for us -we are thinking around 2,000 square feet which is approximately what our house in Greeley is (3 years) (start in 2013 finish sometime in 2014 depending on construction delays)
–Build a pool (optional) not a requirement (4 years + 2015ish)
–Pay off at least one more rental property (3 years -June 2014)
–Save up enough money to buy a car, furniture, and living expenses for at least 1 year (before we move permanently -year 4 or 5)

Of course we want to visit our property as often as possible in the meantime and try to get as much done to it when we are supervising it as possible. We also have fun goals like getting chickens, planting lots of flowers and fruit trees, starting a website for our cabana/fresh food business, etc. But I would count those as implicit in achieving these larger goals (to the big one).

So there you have it. It will be interesting to see how much we can achieve in these next few years. Of course, this is all based on the trajectory that we are currently on, so it could be slightly more or less depending on what the future holds. In any case we are looking forward to all the adventures that will lead us there.