What I Want to Accomplish in 2011

It is so hard to believe that we are already half way through the month of January. Before I know it, it will be June!

Even though I haven't posted my 2011 goal list yet I have already been chipping away at it! But for your reading pleasure here are my 2011 goals.  Some of them may seem awfully familiar to 2010.

Financial


We started off the year with a credit card, a personal loan, and our mortgage. I normally wouldn’t suggest consolidating unsecured debt like credit cards into one loan because if you don’t close the cards and are not disciplined enough not to use them, you can sometimes rack back up a balance on the credit cards that you have paid off…I know this from experience. HOWEVER my employer offers small personal loans at zero percent interest and since the credit card with the balance has not been used in over a year, I figured we would be ok. I consolidated the credit card and the personal loan that we already had into the zero percent loan. This will save us quite a bit of money each month in interest that we were paying on the credit card.

Our financial goals for 2011 are

- Pay off the personal loan. If we work really hard we can accomplish this by the end of the year.

- Start a Roth IRA for both of us.

- Continue to grow our savings account.

- Up my contribution to my 401K ***I already upped it with my first paycheck of the year and hope to increase it at least one more time this year.

Spiritual

- Spend more time reading the Bible. I would really like to say that I will read the whole thing in a year but I want to be realistic. I know that won’t happen.

- Family and personal devotion time.  I have a couple of devotional books by Gary Thomas, the author of Sacred Marriage.  I have done a few of them but not on a consistent basis like I want.

Personal

- Lose weight ***I have already lost 3 pounds since the beginning of the year!

- Read more in general. I like to read and not just blogs. :) HA! Not only do I want to read my Bible more but I also want to read more books. I have a list and will put those into a seperate post.  It is quite a lofty list that I have and I know that I won't have time to read them all this year but I want to keep track of the ones I do read. 

- Blog more. I don’t want to put a number on how many blog posts I want to write but the number of posts went down in 2010 from what I did in 2009 so I just want to write more than I did in 2010. I love blogging but sometimes I get so caught up in the thought that I need to have pictures in each post. I didn’t start blogging to have millions of pictures

- work on having more date nights.  We did a few last year but they were few and far between.  I want to try to have them on a consistent basis this year. 

Get More Organized
I try to be organized, I really do, however my system of organization is what I call organized chaos.  I know where everything is, at least I know what pile of stuff it is in!  :) This drives my husband nuts and it is something that I really am working on. 

- clean out the pantry ***I did this last Saturday.  I just need to buy a few storage containers for cereal and other items and then I will be finished!

- Get rid of all the clutter on the countertops in my kitchen. We have appliances and just well, junk, sitting all over the counters and it drives me nuts. It just makes everything look dirty because of it all.  This is a goal that I am bringing over from 2010 and while I did get rid of alot of the stuff on the countertops it just seemed to fill back up again. {which brings me to the next one}

- Get more storage for the kitchen.  I am actually thinking of adding a cabinet by our back door.


- Find a new spot for all the “junk” in the junk drawer. We have always had a junk drawer in every place that we have lived in. A place to store pens, batteries and misc items. This drawer has seemed to explode and is now not very organized. It doesn’t help that Lauren wants to draw and will rummage through it to find a pen or something. I want to pull all of the stuff out of the drawer and find it a new home. This will also free up some space in the kitchen.  {yes I did just copy and paste this from 2010}

- Clean out and organize my cookbook cabinet. I have tons and tons and tons and TONS of recipes. Some cookbooks that I have bought and a couple of binders that I have put together to store my recipes. But I have several hundred pieces of paper that have recipes that I have printed out. Some I have tried, some I haven’t. I want to go through them all and compile them into the binders for more organization. I also need to weed out the ones that I didn’t like or the ones that I know I just won’t try. The cabinet is getting so full that I can’t put anything else in it so it is HIGH time I do something about it. I also have several hundred recipes in my inbox that I have found on the internet that I need to go through and organize. I like to email myself one recipe at a time with the name of it in the subject line so that I can find it easier. I also have folders for all the different types. I just need to get better at actually sorting them into those folders! {another copy and paste, I know that this is going to be a really big project and I the close I got to starting it last year was to group all the like recipes together, at least I tried.}

- Keep organizing pictures on the computer and purchase an automatic online backup system.  I have an external harddrive but I want other backup options too just in case. 


I am going to be much better about posting my progress on these goals.  Last year I kind of forgot about a bunch of them and I think that led to me not actually doing them!