Okay. I’ve been in a huuuuuge funk for… um all of 2015? For awhile, at least. I need help. Like a personal assistant or something. Any takers? 🙂
So here are my April goals.
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Do not watch a single Lifetime Original Movie.
This is so lame, you guys. I am all about the Lifetime Original Movies, and I feel like they are sucking up my time that should be used for other things.
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Finish Better Than Before, the book I received for March’s Birchblogger’s Book Club.
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Take, like, a zillion pictures of our California trip.
Ryan and I are GOING TO CALIFORNIA TOMORROW. Seeing ALL my friends (including my best friends Lucy and Layla) and Ryan’s first trip to DISNEYLAND… it all needs to be documented more than I’ve been documenting lately .
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List items for sale on eBay.
One of my 101 in 1001 things is to make $200 off of eBay sales. I have the spare closet full of things to sell, but now I just need to go sell them!
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Keep track of blogging stats.
Despite the fact that I’ve been quiet on the blogging front this past week, I LOVE blogging. I think blogging is one of the coolest things ever. I have a full time job, so it’s kind of hard for me to balance blogging AND life, but I want to start sharing the back-end of my blogging experience – traffic, any money I make, products I receive for reviews, etc. Hopefully in time I can use this reflection to help me better shape the future of my blog.
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Do an Empties post.
In a previous post, I’d mentioned wanting to do a monthly (or bi-monthly, depending on the month) post of the products I’d used up. I’ve FINALLY caught up, and now I need to make sure I post one before the end of April!
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Get back on the envelope system
I’m just going to be honest about this. I am at a place in my life where there is nothing I’m saving to buy, nothing I’m saving to do… and so I tend to spend money carelessly. Not excessively, like I don’t have fancy things… but I just don’t watch my money. I still have bills – I owe $21,000 on my car, and I have $1,900 on a credit for my dentist, and my credit card has a balance of $1,400. So I have close to $25,000 in debt. None of it overwhelms me or anything, but imagine what life would be like without that debt. My friend Ernie has taught me SO MUCH about finances and how to be responsible with your money. I tend to think “I’m not married and I live at home with my mom. My life is comfortable and my money situation is fine, so I can start budgeting and being careful with my money when I need to.”
I’ve decided I want to be more diligent about my debt repayment and not spending carelessly. I used envelopes to help me save money back in August when I was saving up for my friends wedding, but when I returned from the trip at the end of September I fell off track. Any tips/suggestions/etc for your experiences with budgeting and paying off debt?
What are your April Goals? Do we share any of the same ones? 🙂
have so much fun in California!!! that sounds like a dream vacation!
We started Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace university a couple weeks ago. He says to do the Debt Snowball. You pay your minimum payment on all you debts every month and anything extra you have after you’ve budgeted goes toward your smallest debt. Once you pay off the smallest debt, you keep budgeting that payment but it goes toward your next debt. So for you it seems like you’d concentrate on the credit card. Once that’s paid off, keep budgeting the money that you were paying toward the credit card and put it toward your dentist bills. Once both of those are paid off you put all of that toward your car payment.
I’m not a huge fan of Dave Ramsey the personality, but I think a lot of what he has to say about getting out of debt and investing makes sense. I also like how much psychological research his team has done. The debt snowball is set up that way because they have found that a person is more likely to stick with paying off their debts if they can see proof it is getting somewhere. Chipping away at 20,000 a month at a time will feel like it is taking forever to pay off, but you can see 1,000 shrink to 500 pretty quickly.