The New Year's Resolution

How many blogs do you think start on January 1? My guess would be a lot. We all make these resolutions then need someone- something- to hold us accountable. My method of choice: the blog.

Though really, I am not doing this for the New Year's glory. I'm doing it because I read too many books. I read so many books that I thought, I want to write a book! A.J. Jacobs writes these great memoirs all about him doing something completely weird for a year of his life. In The Know-It-All, he spent a year reading the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, in The Year of Living Biblically he... well... you can probably guess.

So I was sitting here reading A.J. Jacobs one day and I said, "I want to write a book about doing something weird for a year!" My husband said, "good luck with that." ...I am rarely taken seriously in my house... Then he suggested I start a daily blog about doing something weird. That's how many of these books are started, he says.

So I thought about it... what could I do every day for a year? The goal I came up with: no eating out for a year! This is an honorable goal. The drive-thru lady at Burger King knows us by name. My kids think Taco Bell is part of everyone's daily diet. I was really gung-ho about this. I created a month's worth of menus (breakfast, lunch, AND dinner). I thought about making a graph. All kinds of excitement. But then, I really started thinking about the rules. What does "no eating out for a year" really mean? What if someone else is paying for it? Then is it OK? We love eating out. Could we really do this for a year?

I made a list of exceptions, such as if someone else is paying then it's OK. Then I realized, that's just bogus. It doesn't count if you have twenty exceptions.

So unbeknownst to my sweet husband, I'm giving that one up. Though not entirely. The new goal is to budget like I've never budgeted before. Thanks to the genius of Dave Ramsey, I dug us out of a hole once. We got most of our credit cards paid off and saved enough to get out of renting and into a mortgage. That was last year. Then we moved into said house, and then Christmas came, and now we have about $2000 in credit card debt again. And the mortgage. And I will soon be a college graduate so student loans are right around the corner. A lot of student loans. And did I mention I'm a stay at home mom?

Our belts definitely need to be tightened, so that's what this blog is about. This year I intend to do whatever it takes to get our finances in order. There will be lots of personal information shared, probably a few failures, and hopefully some successes. Dear Reader, we will travel this lone and murky road of personal finance together, and we will both come out the other side, though I cannot guarantee unscathed.