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1. Get a planner. Use said planner. Be more organized. Hurray! I just got my cute little planner today at a calendar store for 50% off and I love it. It's slender, but has both full-month and weekly pages as well as areas for lists and notes. I'm using one of the bookmarks Otto made me to keep the current week marked. Rob was like, "Google Calendar, hello?" but I am the kind of girl who needs to make lists, cross things off, and write things down with a pen. My "planner" for the past year consisted of notes written to myself on old receipts, in sharpie, wadded up in the bottom of my purse. This year, I'm all fancy!
2. Meal planning. This sounds minor but it's actually major. This week has been our first of meal planning and I already feel relief, knowing what we'll have for dinner every night of the week and not worrying about what pathetic sham of a meal I'm going to scrounge up at the last minute with whatever's around the house. Yesterday I made broccoli cheddar soup from scratch and we had that with a loaf of multigrain bread from Eugene City Bakery (yum!). Tonight we had the leftover soup on baked potatoes. Meal planning is going swimmingly! And I think we'll probably save some good money this way too, because it's been a bit of a pizza delivery extravaganza around these parts lately. My meal planning will take place on Saturdays for the following Sun-Sat week and I'll make a grocery list of whatever we need for the meals. I'm hoping to try out some new recipes too! And then we'll shop on Saturday or Sunday for all the ingredients and shaBAM! we will rock dinners in 2013!
3. Rock my body. In my case, this means getting those last fifteen or so (cough, cough) pounds of baby weight shed but more importantly it means getting fit. I am using the "Lose It!" app as of yesterday and I already really love it. I'm also going to get more exercise. I want to feel great about how I feel and lately I've felt super sludgy. So on top of simply losing the weight, I am going to exercise for at least 20 minutes 3 days per week and completely cut out quite a few types of food that I've been indulging in lately... namely red meat, fried things, and sweets.
4. Nothing new. This is a change I made back in 2011 that I stuck to for almost 6 months and it made quite an impact on our bank account and our attitude towards buying things. The rules are pretty easy: don't buy anything new, but used is fine. See? With the exception of obvious stuff like food, toiletries, and if anyone needs underwear or whatever. This resolution was such a challenge but I absolutely loved it before and I'm hoping to love it again. It forces you to search hard for the things you need and to not make impulse buys that are a waste of your money anyways (like stickers, why can't I resist buying Otto stickers???). We'll see how it goes. I'm crazy stoked about it. I'll be using my sweet planner to make thrift store scavenger hunt lists. So that's neat!
5. Consolidate debt. It's hard to write anything about this that sounds interesting so I won't try. But just to say that if you have a bunch of credit card debt you should consider getting a single loan with better interest, paying all the cards down, and then cutting them up. We are doing this and basically saving hundreds a month plus paying our debt down faster. Win/Win! Credit cards are rubbish. Such a slippery slope. My amazing dad helped us out more than I can say in getting this together and I'm super excited to be debt free by 2015!
So what are your resolutions? I'm on a resolution bender! Whoohoo for taking charge of shiz and owning 2013!
ps. Today is Otto's 4th birthday! Exactly four years ago today my life got 10,000x better than I could have ever imagined. I'm so excited to try to trick him into going out for sushi with us today for a mini birthday dinner. I'll share pics soon from his AZ family birthday party last week and upcoming Chuck E Cheese party in a couple of weeks. Egad we are doing the Chuck E Cheese thing, yes we are.
Happy New Year!
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