Sunday Evening Post: New Year Edition

Day

Amount

Place

Category

Monday

$50.50

Gas

Car

Tuesday

$8.00

Lunch

Allowance

$12.00

Safeway

Groceries

Saturday

$89.00

CostCo

Groceries

$1.00

Safeway

Groceries

$5.00

Parking

Car

 

 

Only about $165 in spending this week, and it would have been less if I had remembered to bring our CostCo gift cards to CostCo. Oh well, they’ll keep the spending down another week. There might still be a parking expense this evening.

 

The New Year is not starting off on the best note on the personal side (vs the financial side).  At this moment in time, I’m not ready to go into details, but the MIL went from being a week or so away from going home on Christmas Eve to being in the ICU on New Year’s Eve.

 

Over the next week or so, I’ll be doing my yearly comparisons going back 3-4 years, showing how C and I have changed our spending patterns (or at least our tracking our spending patterns) and have a good retrospective on what worked for us in 2011 and what didn’t.

Things I do count as a success:

We paid for all of C’s college courses in cash. As long as tuition prices don’t go up too much (state budget cuts), we actually have enough in savings to pay the rest of his tuition through 2013.

We paid $0 in credit card interest this year, while still earning $300 worth of credit card rewards in the form of gift cards and money off of travel. This despite losing one dog to cancer and then having a cancer scare with another one. Yay for having an emergency fund.

Our basement has not flooded this winter, for the first winter since we bought this house. While we are still paying on the basement work until April, let me tell you, I definitely count this one a win.

 

I also have some goals for 2012. Nothing as exciting as what some of the other bloggers have posted, but things I’m working on, none the less.

1)      I want to have at least one piece of fiction writing accepted for publication- a paying publication.

2)      I want to publish my next art/fiction combination book, working with an artist I adore. The goal is for it to pay for itself, and maybe even a little extra.

3)      I plan to attend FinCon12. Preliminary research shows plane tickets should cost a little over $200, and that Jana of Daily Money $hot is willing to share a room with me, cutting both of our hotel fees in half. I am beyond excited about this. However, it still is going to cost me 4 months’ worth of allowance, and I am bad about saving my allowance, so I need to get some discipline around that. I plan to use any money I make from my fiction, the book, or ads toward FinCon.

Aggressively, I’d like to say I want to pay for FinCon completely with side hustle money, but I also want to be realistic.

4)      I want to become a full member of Yakezie. (You’ll see more about this in Tuesday’s post.)

5)      I would like to actually make money from this blog. I haven’t checked my Google Adsense account since I started my website, so it’s possible I’ve already made some, but somehow I doubt it. For this, I’ll need to reach out to others on the Yakezie network for help and advice.

6)      I want to be healthier. I refuse to make it a goal to lose weight, even though I am morbidly obese, per BMI. I believe very much in the Healthy at Any Weight movement. Sure it would be nice to be skinnier; that’s much more acceptable in our society, but I want healthy. I want to improve my endurance, get my knees in better shape, and keep my cholesterol under control. (Both sides of my family have cholesterol issues, so it’s a battle against genetics, but one I think can be managed.)

I know Larry will make a great running companion, so I need to research parks around here that have good, FLAT running trails. Hills are everywhere. I need flat, at least to start.

So those are my 6 goals for the year that I am 62 years old.

I hope that everyone has a great 2012, and I look forward to seeing what everyone can accomplish.