With a new year comes new resolutions for many. Some people choose more personal goals such as losing weight, exercising more, or spending more time with the family. Others focus on financial issues such as paying off a credit card or saving/investing more money. Whatever your resolution, it’s easy to stay focused and excited about it at first, but motivation can quickly wane.
I don’t get too crazy with resolutions for the new year, but I did have a few things I wanted to work on this year. On the non-financial side, I want to get rid of clutter. It isn’t so much the little stuff collecting dust around the house, but the tons and tons of utter crap that we don’t use and just sits in storage, either in the garage, basement, or closets. We moved into our house over 3 years ago, and we still have boxes of stuff that hasn’t been unpacked since we moved two years prior to that! So we have a lot of stuff that’s been just taking up space for about 5 years. So, I’m done with it. If we haven’t missed it, or needed it in that amount of time, we won’t miss it if it goes to the trash or is donated. So far this week, we’ve made some headway on this goal and took two trailer loads of stuff to the dump. We’re off to a great start, and we just need to keep up with it so that we can have only the stuff we really need. Besides, with a baby coming in just a couple months, we’ll soon be accumulating a lot more “stuff” that will probably just fill the void.
On the financial side, there are no major resolutions. Virtually everything we do is on autopilot already. The only thing I wanted to accomplish was to pay off a few remaining nagging debts, and have one of our cars paid off by the end of the year (about 2.5 years early). If we can do that, we should have no problem in reaching our goal of being completely debt free, minus a relatively small mortgage balance, by the end of 2010.
So, how about you? What kind of resolutions did you make this year, and how are things going? Have you already fallen off the wagon, or are you well on your way to achieving your goals?
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Author: Jeremy Vohwinkle
My name is Jeremy Vohwinkle, and I’ve spent a number of years working in the finance industry providing financial advice to regular investors and those participating in employer-sponsored retirement plans.
