One of my main goals in life is to make sure that I won't suffer any financial hardship. I also would like to be able to comfortably work only part-time by the time I'm 35 (lofty goal, I know!). I love my job as an insurance agent, and the place and people I work for are outstanding, but I think I would like it that much better if I weren't there 5 days a week.

My thought is that I can work part time to pay for things that don't stop coming, like utilities, food, gas, and mortgage. I would also like to pay off my mortgage as soon as possible, but am somewhat reserved in this because psychologically, not having that debt would feel great, but it might work out better for me in the long run to just keep deducting the interest in my taxes. I've been looking into this, but probably will feel a little more pressure to nail it down as it gets closer to my first tax season with the interest deducted.

I have been fiddling with Excel to figure out a good way to calculate my assets along with all my liabilities, and at some point would like to keep it posted here, to update regularly so I can watch it (hopefully!) grow. This also will be partly just psychological to keep me motivated and to see exactly where everything goes.

At this point, I have about $9000 in student loans to pay off, a mortgage of about $97000, and contribute 11% to my 401k, as well as another 3% I just decided to transfer automatically to an IRA through work. I make roughly 29,000/year, but that changes with bonuses. So far this year I've made about 20k, so if that keeps up I could easily clear 40k this year!