Update - Week 1

I am so pumped about this year, I can't hardly stand it!!!! I am so motivated and excited about my resolutions that it is really consuming me. I spent a huge chunk of what could be a family day yesterday on planning my grocery trips for this week! In my defense, Chad has been home 10 of 14 days! So there has been much family time and I didn't feel like I was neglecting anything; quite the opposite! I felt like I was contributing and that it was time VERY well spent!).

My fitness/healthier eating initiative has been less exciting and focused on. I start the day with it forefront on my mind, however it easily falls by the wayside when I get distracted by something shiny!!! Even though I have not begun exercising (my last date plan to start has been tomorrow in my mind, so I think that is why it has been so easy for me to let it pass this week) I have been very mentally consumed and do not find myself snacking out of boredom, so that is a good thing. We will see what things look like when the old routine starts tomorrow and how I work everything out.

But the money part of my resolutions is going GANGBUSTERS! It is also the one I have really been focusing on, partly because a new year and month is a perfect time and partly because it has been in dire straits for too long and something needs to change here, fast. Chad and I are not getting younger (we are still young, I guess! But not for much longer!) and we have a lot of things we want to do with our lives. Kids don't have to be expensive, however college is and I don't want to put my kids in that kind of debt right out of the gate. And I dream of a home near a body of water. Not for now, but for later. I would love to get some land in a few years and work up to building a custom home that is tailor made for retirement. Ahhhh, bliss. And I am pretty certain that my beloved does not want to work 2, 3 or sometimes 4 (yes, this happened this summer!) jobs to support these things. It was hard enough when he worked that many jobs and we still kept going into debt! At any rate, getting our money house in order has really been fun for me.

We sat up for 4 hours last night and hammered out the first few steps to Dave Ramsay's Total Money Makeover. How awesome it felt, I can't tell you!!! We are fortunate to get a nice chunk of money from family for Christmas, and that is also why now is a good time to get our money situation under control. So, we now have $1,000 in cash (stashed safely away for emergencies ONLY). We are current with our outstanding debts (my dear hubs is in charge of payments and when times get tough, he stops opening mail. That is sorta dangerous). The nice side benefit of this is a lot of the outstanding debt we had was misleading. Our insurance requires us to "check in" once a year, so we had all of this medical debt that was OBSCENE and the reason it was outstanding was our PPO was just waiting for us to call and say hi. What a pile of doo. It really ticks me off, but that is for somewhere else. Anyway, after we paid those, we were able to pay off one of our credit cards, the one with the highest balance! Wa-hey!!! And then we are either paying off our 401k loan (we had to take it out when we had 2 mortgages in 2006) or paying off most of the other credit card (and then snowballing those payments). We will be out of consumer debt in about 19 months, if we play our cards right and things go the way they are supposed to (taxes, Christmas, bonuses...etc). That is a huge step and a tiny one at the same time, because we owe may parents a bunch for a down payment on our mcmansion (it is interest free and they just want to be paid once, not in payments) plus a 2nd mortgage, but we are leaving those for steps 5 and 6. It is easy for me to feel defeated if I feel like the mountain is too high.

I am also really jazzed about planning my grocery trips, matching up coupons, using Walgreens and CVS. That has been fun. Also the ebates and big crumb sites; we have a gas station (tons of them, actually) that offers points with a loyalty card and it is SO easy to rack those up, so going to join that....

To be honest, I feel slightly foolish that it has taken me this long to get into all this stuff. The money I have wasted - whew! And it kills me now to talk to other people and see how they just don't pay attention to this stuff! It just seems to easy and I don't know why you wouldn't want to!!

Go 2009!