I’m happy to write that earlier this week I had the pleasure of writing the final check to close out my car loan. The bank no longer has any hold on my car or a small piece of my paycheck! The loan was not due to be paid off until sometime in 2010, so I’m way ahead of schedule. I’ve only been able to do this so quickly by staying frugal and paying off small chunks at a time. Keeping score of the amount left also kept me motivated to continue paying it down.

On to the next goal, time to fill my savings account. In order to make my goal I’m going to need to focus my savings on a rather extreme level. Time will tell.

This is hardly personal finance related, but it is a new goal I have come up with as well as getting a few of my friends interested. During a football game this weekend, one of the announcers said that one of the players had done over 100,000 push-ups over the past year in training. That is a sick amount of push-ups and I’m in no shape to get near that number. Instead I have come up with a personal goal of completing 10,000 between Sept. 1, 2008 and Sept 1, 2009. I am using google docs to keep track of my progress and have added the goal to my list. I know its only a measly 29 push-ups a day, every day, for a year. Even so, its additional physical training I wouldn’t do otherwise and its a goal on the lighter side of things.

If you would like to join in the challenge, I would be happy to add you to the spreadsheet and make you a collaborator on the document.

Over the weekend I checked out a feature of my ING Direct Savings account. ING makes it incredibly easy to create a new account and have it become part of your online profile. Basically you can have multiple savings accounts under a single login. Each account can have a unique name, or in my case a goal. I decided it was time to set up something specifically for my 2009 goal of learning to ride and owning a motorcycle.

If you already have an ING account, creating sub-accounts is easy. Just login and on your homepage look for the link under your account that says “Open another account“.  You will be directed to an account type selection page. For my purposes I just needed another Orange Savings. After another page you will be directed to a page that looks like this:

Here is where you can specify the name of the account to match your goal. Best of all, the funding can be easily linked to your other ING savings accounts or even your original checking account linked to an outside bank. Once you complete the steps you will be directed back to your ING accounts page and the new account will be shown in the list:

After that if you want this to be a dedicated savings for that goal, I recommend setting up an automatic savings plan to passively and easily save.

If you would like to start an ING savings account with a free $25 starting bonus email me or leave a comment and I will send you a referral link asap.

As I’ve mentioned a few times, I recently started a new job. Along with that comes new team of people to work with. With my luck, I manage to end up on a team full of motorcycle enthusiasts, since it is one of the goals I have set aside for 2009. Fortunately the Midwest only has a few months left of decent weather to ride in, because the temptation has been growing on me since I got the idea. The lack of nice weather will quickly curtail any possibility of deviating from my plan.

In the meantime I can help myself along gradually by satisfying key points of interest:

• Finish paying off my car.
• Start setting money aside for the bike.
• Find a local motorcycle safety class to get my license in (enroll next spring).
• Figure out what I want in a bike, make/model, and cc’s.
• Avoid reading motorcycle classifieds on craigslist (a difficult habit to break).

Now I just have make all of the above tasks last 10 months. Maybe I should add some more?

With today being my last day, I was also paid for unused vacation and the 3 days this pay period I worked. As a result I basically received another paycheck and bounced immediately to the credit union to put some big money down on my car loan. I am now 85% complete with this goal! I decided it was better to knock off a piece of my goal instead of going spending crazy with the additional money.
Full disclosure: I did keep the extra $38 off the top for my extended weekend though.