Every year, I make the same resolutions, and every year, I stick to them faithfully until about the third week of January. Some of the resolutions are personal, and some are financial. I'll just talk about the financial ones here.
Last year's financial resolution was to make a profit of $X at my solo law practice. I purposefully posted the number as X on my personal blog because I was raised to view talking about money as kind of crass and taboo, and I still have a hard time getting past that. Unfortunately, I don't remember the value of X that I chose.
Either way, I'm certain X wasn't a negative number, so I can confidently say that I didn't manage to keep that resolution. I ran a loss this year at my solo practice. I know business experts say it takes two years of a new business to turn a profit, so I'm not too demoralized by that, since I've only been up and running for 15 months. This is the year I'm going to make a profit!
I've completed training at the firm that I contract with for my solo practice, so I'm going to start getting a higher percentage of the fees that I bring in. It's been a slow process, and I kind of feel like the potential income was oversold to me when I interviewed, but I can see some money on the horizon. So my goal/resolution this year is to bring in enough doing the contract work to quit at document review and spend the time focused on finding and building my own clientele. That way I can have my own clients and clients from the firm I contract with and be free of the soul-sucking job of document review.
I'm also setting a goal to not get any deeper into debt. My student loan payments don't even cover the interest, so my balance grows by the day. But I'm hoping to attack my credit cards with a vengeance to offset that. I'll deal with the student loans later. If the boat is on fire and leaking slowly, I figure put out the fire before plugging the leak. I can keep bailing out water in the meantime.
Happy New Year. May 2017 be better than 2016.
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