Galapagos Personal Finance Challenge Wrap-Up

Published August 22nd, 2008

Well, the contest and personal finance challenge have drawn to a close, and congratulations once again to the contest winners! The contest was a success, but we didn’t quite meet the self-imposed deadline for the personal finance challenge. For those of you who didn’t read the original post, we issued a challenge to ourselves to earn $11,800 over and above our regular incomes in six weeks to pay for our trip to the Galapagos Islands this October.

What happened during the six weeks

In a nutshell, I didn’t follow my own rule of tackling one goal at a time…but not on purpose. Why? An unexpected change in my career plans came up right after I issued the challenge. I thought what better way to motivate us to do something crazy like work extra hard to earn an additional $12,000 than by putting it in the blog–and what the heck, let’s run that summer contest we planned on doing anyway. Since the timing overlapped, we came up with the great Galapagos Contest and Personal Finance Challenge. We decided that we could come up with the required amount if my husband ran a bike tune-up business from our home over his summer holidays, and I would work a few extra shifts at the emergency clinic–but then things changed.

So, exactly one week after I issued this challenge, I got a job offer…but not for the dream job I’ve been waiting for for the last year and a half, but for a one-year contract with a great company, and no benefits. So I had to make the agonizing decision about whether to take this other job, or wait for my dream job with the public sector that I know is coming whenever their hiring freeze is over (you can read more about this in When Career Plans Change).

I decided to take the contract for now, and know that the door isn’t completely closed on the dream job. Taking this new job, however, meant additional monthly expenses like a double in our gas consumption from my long commute, buying an appropriate wardrobe (at deep discount), and monthly premiums for having to buy our own dental and health insurance plan. This not only meant our expenses increased, but that I wouldn’t have time to do those extra emerg shifts I’d planned on.

The result

We did still manage to earn $7780 (or 66%) of our goal in the time frame before the bill came due. The other $4020 came out of our emergency fund, which we will definitely be able to pay back before the trip in mid-October. I know that technically this wasn’t an emergency since we booked the trip over a year ago, and knew about it. The important thing is that we didn’t want to incur any debt for this trip, or let anything interfere with our aggressive debt repayment plan for our university loans. So in that respect–mission accomplished! I’m sure some people would disagree over the use of an emergency fund for this purpose, but hey–there’s still money left if a real emergency does come up before we pay it back.

What’s next

What’s next is that I’m finally starting to get excited about the trip! It’s a nice feeling knowing that even if we didn’t quite meet the financial goal, that we were able to come up with other alternate income streams to pay for something extra, over and above our annual expenses. It was also nice knowing that we had the security of our emergency fund (which we worked very hard to build up in the past) in case this self-imposed deadline flopped. Even though the trip is technically payed off, I will leave the pie chart up in the sidebar until I’ve fully paid all of the money back to the emergency fund.

I wonder if next, my dream job will email me at an unexpected time, and career plans will change once again…with my life, probably :)

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