I got a weird feeling about my finances after updating my "Countdown to Retirement" goals at very bottom of my sidebar here, which I've copied here:

Annual Savings Goals:
End of year 1, Nov 2015: $723,469
Actual Savings: $686,593
End of year 2, Nov 2016: $805,974
End of year 3, Nov. 2017: $893,842
End of year 4, Nov. 2018: $987,421
End of year 5, Nov. 2019: $1,087,083

You'll notice that at the end of year 1, Nov. 2015, I failed to meet my 1st year savings goal of $723,469. These were goals I came up with in November 2014 after crunching numbers with several different online retirement calculators, to determine how much money I needed to finance the kind of retirement I want. But I missed the mark, by quite a lot.

Two months later, after calculating my January income and expense numbers, and with mom's help...and this is where I feel the weird part.... I have almost EXACTLY met my 1st year savings goal.

My savings as of January 31 is $723,451. The difference between that and my original 1st year savings goal is just $18.

Thanks, mom. I will use this money wisely to honor your memory.

On a related note...

I am so glad that when I planned my mother's funeral I decided to say in the obituary I wrote that in lieu of flowers, people could make a donation in my mother's memory to either the Alzheimer's Association or any animal welfare organization. Flowers' beauty is fleeting, and I knew I would derive more comfort from the people who came during calling hours than any flowers.

I am so glad I did this because I did not realize how enormously comforting it was to get a card in the mail from various animal groups (or AA) informing me that so-and-so made a donation in mom's name. Not a ton of people did this, but maybe 5 or so did, and each time I learned of it, it really made me feel good because I KNOW my mother would also feel quite touched by it. And appreciative.

Another poignant thought...it seems so many people who were a part of my mother's life have become a part of mine now. If at all I knew these people while mom was alive, I knew of them at a kind of peripheral level, someone I may have met once or twice but didn't know very well. Now that my mom's gone, I find that some of my my mother's neighbors or friends have become my friends. It is so comforting, I can't tell you how much.

My mother's neighbors of 15 years, a married couple in their 60s, have invited me, my dad and my sister to dinner out this spring.

I spent at least an hour with an art gallery owner who had exhibited my mother's work for many years. She listened so much to my troubles, trials and tribulations when my mother was in the nursing home. Yesterday, I tried to pay back some of her kindness while we talked about lost loved ones and how we took care of them. She told me a little about her favorite grandmother, something I can definitely relate to because my mother's mother was also someone I held very dear. The gallery owner is about my age. I will always hold her in high regard because I was with my mother the last time the two of them saw each other. It must have been in the first half of 2015, and I remember so well how the gallery owner, who I discovered had a subtle yet very playful sense of humor, made my mother laugh.

My friend Ron has suggested we take my dad out some day this spring too, in much the same way he suggested years ago that we do different things with my grandmother. Ron is very family-oriented; I do believe he taught me a lot about the value of family. I came from a very fragmented family with divorce and plenty of moves in my past, so I don't think I understood how to cultivate family ties. He did. Anyway, I have two destinations I think my dad might enjoy: 1 is rare breed conservancy that breeds endangered duck species (yes, ducks) and the other is horseofct.org, a group that rescues, rehabilitates and adopts out neglected or abused horses. I'd like to check them out at one of their open houses days and will probably donate to them once I get my employer to recognize them as a legitimate nonprofit (which they are). They just weren't on my employer's database for some reason, probably because they're small and one location.