New Year Resolutions Part 2

So last week I posted our new year goals. This week, I'm going to post our plan about how we will accomplish them. I've already started preparing to start the new year off with a clean slate (literally) by cleaning up the house, putting all my clothes away, organizing my jewelry, etc.

I also made a nifty spreadsheet that I uploaded to Google docs with a list of our goals down the side, and then days of the month across the top. This way, we can keep track, and put an X down on each day that we accomplish one of the goals.

This will hopefully keep us accountable since I look at my Google docs almost every day (our weekly budget and our debt snowball spreadsheets are on Google docs and I update them all the time). Plus, we'll have something to look back on at the end of the year to see how well we did!


I know that for some people this may not work out so well because they either a) don't like spreadsheets, or b) are not as technically savvy and prefer something else more pen and paper.

For those people, I would say you can do the same thing, just make your own little calendars and have them somewhere at your house, say on your refrigerator? Or in the laundry room, or some place like that.

The next step for us will be to take a trip to the store and find some organizational tools. I'm thinking about bins to put things in. Every time we go to get our mail, we bring it in and set it down on the table, or on the counter, and before we know it, a huge pile has accumulated and junk mail is everywhere! We have to push it into a pile on the other side of the table to make room for us to sit down and eat every night. So I'm going to buy a bin to put the mail in, and that way we can keep the mess in one area.

I also think I will look into some laundry baskets that I can use to put my dirty clothes in that help you sort your clothes into lights and darks, so I won't have huge piles in the hallway when I'm doing laundry.

I'm also going to create a reading list for 2013 so I'll know which books I'm supposed to read already. That way, I'll actually read like I want to.


BTW, here is how to upload something to Google docs in case you don't know...

Step 1:

Create a gmail account (I think gmail is a lot better than most other email services anyway).

Step 2:

Locate the bar at the top of the page once you're signed in and click on Drive. This will take you to the Google docs page.

Step 3:

Change the settings to convert uploaded files into the Google docs format. This way, you can edit them later on.

Step 4:

If you've already created a spreadsheet, click the button right next to the create button. This will let you upload your spreadsheet. If not, you can start a new spreadsheet by clicking on create.

Follow the prompts there to upload your spreadsheet, and you're done!

New Year Resolutions

I know this is a couple days early...but I decided to go ahead and make a post about the Mygrant's new year resolutions!

I've always made some kind of goal in my head for the new year, but I've never actually sat down and thought about what I really wanted to accomplish and written it out before. So on the way back to Houston after the holidays, Cody and I made a list together of things that we want to do! I wish we would have done this last year together. We sort of had some goals in our heads but we didn't write any of them out like this. Hopefully, it will be good for the both of us to get on the same page and have common things to work towards together!

The next step is to create a plan of attack to make sure that these goals get done, which I am currently working on. Some of the goals, like the financial one to be debt free by May, I already have a plan in place for. It includes the Dave Ramsey Debt Snow Ball which we have been doing for the past year and a half (and paid off more than $50k already!).

That's the problem with new year resolutions...everyone always just tells you to make a list of goals. No one ever tells you to think about how to achieve them which means they are often just words.

Cody has decided that he is going to give a copy of this list to his supervisor to help keep him accountable (they do things like that where he works at), so I have decided to post it to my blog so anyone who reads it can help keep me accountable. So here it is!

Happy New Year!