Hello, January, I remember you now...

Here it is, the fifth day of the new year and my new spending diet, and already this month is a wash.  Every year I somehow forget that January is inevitably the worst financial month of the year for us.  The car inevitably needs repairs that you hoped would cost two hundred but end up more like six, memberships to organizations that you forgot you belonged to but really want to continue come due, the homeowners' association wants their fee... The list seems to go on.  All I get in the mail are more people wanting money that I forgot they were going to ask for (even though they want it every year).  So that extra $261 that I found by scrimping on all other aspects of our life and was so sure I could apply to debt and really make some headway this year is gone before I ever saw it, plus some.  Saving money and paying off debt can be such a frustrating process sometimes.  Of course it can be most rewarding as well, but January definitely leans more on the frustrating side.

I used to completely panic come January.  Now I only mildly panic.  I've come to realize that money is just money.  There are so many more important things in life.  My children, my marriage, my health.  All of these things will suffer if I spend all my time in a state of panic.  So I just figure out what is most important to pay, pay it now, and worry about the rest next month.  In the end that's all you can do.  You can freak out about how everything is due right now, freak out about how therefore things will be overdue later, freak out about how you are so poor and will never make any headway on your debt, and just freak out about any and everything, but that's not going to put any more money in your bank account.  It's not going to make bills go away.  So it's best to just accept it all and move on.

That's what I'm doing now:  just accepting and moving on.  And remembering that as soon as this month ends, February will begin and that will bring license plate renewals and lord knows what else...  sigh...