Its safe to say that on many accounts 2011 was a less than stellar year. This seems to be the general consensus among most of the people I know from friends to family – finances sucked, stress sucked and health problems with close family members gave the entire year a rather dreary character. I entered 2012 without any big hurrah however, because none of those problems can I leave in the past. My aunt’s cancer isn’t going anywhere, working 16 hour days hasn’t magically made more money appear and those along with lots of other small things means that stress is probably here to stay a while longer as well. While I’d like to be an optimist, the realist in me knows that this is going to be a year of hard work, with much love and support among my family.
And so I have resigned myself to dedicating this year to work. I’ve never had an issue with work ethic, my issues are always more around finding time to play. Normally my new years resolutions have to do with making time for myself to have coffee with friends, or play cello, or do yoga. But this year I’m giving up – if I really wanted to do those things I would do them – screw being well balanced this year… I’m just going to bunker down and spend 2012 working on improving my finances, my studies and my family life.
The Resolutions:
1) By the end of the year the house will be organized
I’m loosely following the plan laid out my mysimplerlife.com for an organizational calendar. Yesterday, I took my first step towards this by roughly organizing my tupperware drawer (I couldn’t find any matching lids when it was time to put away the leftovers).
2) I will close the cabinet doors
This is one of my totally lazy tendencies – our cabinets don’t have spring hinges and so if you open them, they just stay open until you intentionally close them. It looks horrid but I’m usually going a mile a minute and don’t realize I’ve left them open until I hit my head on the corner of one 10 minutes later. It seems like a tiny little thing but makes a big impact and drives me insane.
3) The finances will be done monthly
Every year I say it and so far… hasn’t happened. I’m looking at 4 months of data entry next week so I can get taxes done because I didn’t keep up on it last year. I’ve downloaded the apps for both business and personal finance, I make like 80% of the purchases in the household and the other 20% are really predictable so I’m not sure why I can’t seem to just get myself to do the accounting as it happens and then reconcile monthly like a good little worker bee. Regardless of the reason for the failures in the past – this year I will rock the financial scene.
I feel like I should add something in there about family and education but I made a lot of progress getting both of those in good places last year and I’m happy with them both for now. I’m sure there will be little things to do along the way but for the most part I really enjoy the time and quality of time I spend with my family. And my method of studying became very organized and intentional last year – I’m hoping it can just continue this year as a followup to the relative success it provided.
manicrabbit 