“You control your future, your destiny. What you think about comes about. By recording your dreams and goals on paper, you set in motion the process of becoming the person you most want to be. Put your future in good hands – your own.” – Mark Victor Hansen
From my family to yours, we hope your 2018 has gotten off to a strong start! January has started off with a bang for us, as we scrambled to film a video for the Cancun.com Cancun Experience Officer (CEO) Search Top 50! Although we did not end up moving on to the Top 10, we learned a lot throughout the experience (and will share more thoughts on this on a future post).
As many of you know, this is the year that we are finalizing our full time travel plans, selling everything we own, and starting our family adventure. However, this isn’t a simple “gap year” in which we’ll get “travel out of our system” and return to a normal, everyday kind of life. Far from it! We are building an online business that will hopefully enable us to incorporate travel into our daily lives according to our family values. And in order to do so, we have set some goals that we will be striving to accomplish throughout this year and will track continuously. Each of these goals are designed to help us reach our end goal: to establish a culturally and educationally rich, location independent, financially sustainable lifestyle for ourselves and our children.
We’ve separated our goals into three categories: Family Goals, Travel Goals, and Business Goals. So without further ado, here they are!
Family Goals
This year, we have set 4 goals that are related directly to our family. These are the kinds of goals that aren’t fully centered on our travel adventure, but may be complementary to it. After all, our first priority is our family, so these four goals would not only improve the health and wellness of our family, but it would put us in the best position to find success as full time travelers.
1. Make sure Santi and Nora are proficient swimmers by the end of the year
Since we’re starting our travels in Southeast Asia, we’ll have plenty of options when it comes to taking a dip! We enrolled Santi and Nora in swimming lessons already and hope that by the time we start our travels, Santi will be a full swimmer and Nora will be well on her way to diving in with no fears. After all, when it comes to tropical climates, there’s no better way to cool off than to jump in a pool 🙂
2. Get Santi to eat 10 new foods this year
We don’t write a lot about this on our blog, but Santi is a very anxious and picky eater due to an over responsive sensory system. We have done feeding therapy over the years with little progress. Since his sense of sight is very heightened, he often notices little differences even within the same type of food so is particular with brands. This means that if something doesn’t look right to him, he just won’t eat it and even a small bite can make him gag. We’re working hard on having him let go of his fear of food, and even though 10 new foods doesn’t sound like a lot, it would mark HUGE progress for us! At the very minimum, we’re comforted by the fact that he enjoys eating different fruits, cereals, and one or two veggies. Although we’ll be traveling to places that might not have his usual selections, there should still be food that he could eat to get all the nutrients and vitamins that he needs.
3. Potty-train Nora before we leave
This one might be one of the very first goals that we accomplish, since Nora is already aware of when she goes potty in her diaper, haha. It would sure be handy not to have to pack diapers as we travel!
4. Make time to go on “date outings” every other week
As parents, it’s very easy to get accustomed to focusing all of your energy into raising your kids. However, doing that also makes it harder to maintain our marriage. This year we want to set a goal for Jess and me to go on “date outings” at least every other week. This might be a little harder once we start traveling, but we plan on booking some of our stays in hotels with kids’ clubs. This would allow us to have a little free time to ourselves and focus on our relationships, not just the kids, our travels and the blog.
Travel Goals
The main reasons we are traveling the world is that we want to experience new cultures, spend more time together, and strive to generate location-independent income. These goals are measurable ways to gauge the progress of our travels and should motivate us to try to develop a routine during a period of constant transition 🙂
5. Visit at least 10 countries in 2018
One of the first things we had to decide as we started planning our journey was: are we doing slow travel or fast travel? We decided on doing fast travel to start because we want to experience as many family-friendly destinations as we can during our adventures. This would aid us in gaining a breadth of experiences so if we ever wanted to establish a “home base” somewhere, we’d have plenty of reference points to reach back to. Since we’re starting our travels in June, we’re planning on spending about 2 weeks in each country. Starting off on this relatively fast pace will allow us to make our travel processes as efficient as possible so we can turn around and share those best practices with you!
6. Volunteer for at least 10 charitable organizations
Aside from seeing all the beautiful sights and locations at each of our destinations, we want to find ways to give back to the communities that are supporting our travels. As such, we are determined to highlight and support charitable organizations in each of the countries that we visit. We know that our children are incredibly fortunate to be going on a travel adventure, and we also want to instill a sense of volunteerism and giving back at a young age.
7. Meet up with at least 5 other families during our travels
As we share our travel experiences and plans on our social media platforms, we’re starting to connect with multiple families that either live abroad, or travel constantly. If you’re one of those families and will be somewhere in Southeast Asia between June and December, please contact us at [email protected]. We’d love to meet up with you! And if you have kids, even better, because Santi and Nora would love having new play buddies 😁 Although we’ll be traveling alone, knowing other families are doing something similar and learning from each other would be tremendously valuable.
Business Goals
To be totally honest, I don’t consider myself to be a big risk taker. Making the decision to leave my active duty Air Force career and start an online business is probably the riskiest thing I’ve done. However, since I’m a bit of an analytical nerd, I feel like I’ve been able to mitigate a lot of the risk so that we can focus on growing our business instead of being nervous wrecks. Although we don’t know what the future will have in store for us, we are excited to venture out on our own and pursue the following business goals. These goals are designed to build our business (content creation, social media marketing) into a sustainable model that will allow us to continue to travel and delight our community 😊
8. Write and publish 100 different articles on The Jetsetting Family website
This is a valuable goal for us. We built this blog not only so we could share our adventures with friends and family, but also to provide actionable content to help all families travel more. I’ll admit, we didn’t end 2017 with a lot of content, so we want to dedicate 2018 to developing a consistent publishing schedule. This means that we’re going to try to post two articles a week! The website is divided into two main sections: Adventures and Blog. Our adventures will be recaps of the places we visited, accommodations we stayed at, etc. The blog section will contain more general travel tips, motivational posts, how-to guides, and more, so stay tuned for this upcoming content!
9. Grow our YouTube channel to 1,000 subscribers
We’re really excited to be able to document our adventures and edit them into “home movies” on YouTube 🙂 Once we start traveling, we want to publish our videos on a consistent basis. We’re currently aiming on posting one new video each week, and by providing value and entertainment we hope to be able to grow our subscriber base on YouTube!
10. Grow our Instagram page to 25,000 followers
Instagram is where it all began! We started our account on April 30, 2017 and will be happy to celebrate our first year. We had originally set a goal to reach 10,000 followers our first year, and we’re really close to getting there a few months early 🙂 Although our goal here is stated in terms of follower count, what we are really focusing on is establishing a sense of COMMUNITY in our Instagram account. We want to tell you stories in our posts, from the funny moments in our lives to our most embarrassing ones 😬 We do this in hopes that you will share your stories along with us as well!
11. Establish a monthly revenue of $2,000/month
This is probably the most important goal. However, this one feels impossible to accomplish if we’re not striving to complete all the other goals stated above. As we’ve mentioned, our business model is based on providing valuable content, building an audience, and gaining authority in the family travel niche. This would hopefully unlock opportunities for us to be able to partner with brands that we love as well as create valuable products that would enhance your ability to travel the world! We’re funding the initial months of our travels with our savings, and working hard all along the way so that we can earn the income that enables us to sustain our adventures and put us on a path to long-term business success.
So there you have it. We have a total of 11 goals spread out across three categories. We’ll be tracking each of our goals every month and providing status updates on how we’re doing with each of them. If you haven’t set your own goals or resolutions for 2018, we highly suggest you do so! And if you already have some, please share them in the comments below, we’d love to follow and cheer you on as you accomplish your own goals this year!
