2010 Goals

I have finally decided what my goals for 2010 will be. I did a lot of thinking about these and I didn't want to have too many because I felt like I would overwhelm myself. So I came up with 3 and they are pretty simple.

1. Take better care of myself.
Instead of saying I am going to exercise X amount of times or lose X amount of pounds I came up with the idea of simply taking care of myself, mentally and physically. Recently I posted about how I am slowly starting to feel comfortable in my own skin, and this ties into that. I need to show myself that I love myself enough to take care of ME. So what does this mean exactly? It means I will try really hard to think about the foods I am eating and whether or not it's really good for me. When I have a craving for fast food, I will stop myself and think of what's best for ME. When I have free time and I am bored, I will try to motivate myself to go out and go for a walk, or put on John Mayer and do some yoga (atleast the poses that I remember). Of course this also means I am not going into super crazy diet mode and denying myself all the time, because that is going to backfire. I just need to learn to moderate myself better. I also plan to do some research about how to find meat that comes from farms that are feeding the animals organic foods/treating them better.

2. I will not pay full price for a single book!
( The exception is if it is a gift for somebody else, or if I received a gift card as a gift.)
I came up with this idea because I am an avid reader. At work we put all our breaks together so I am on break for anywhere from 45 mins to an hour. It does not take me an hour to eat, so I need to have a book to read. Having a book to read also prevents me from eating more! lol. So naturally, I go through a lot of books. So I will be mostly buying books from the used book store where you can also bring books in for store credit. So this rarely results in actually having to pay anything. I will also buy used books from Goodwill or Value Village. And if I have to have something that's brand new that I cannot find used I will buy only from Amazon where the books are SO much less money, and then it will be mostly with gift cards from Swagbucks.

3. Pay down my car to $9000.00
I calculated that after all my regular car payments at the end of the year I will owe about $9500 and change. I am going to try to pay down that extra $500 to make it $9000 even. This works out to be only about $47 extra a month so I hope I can do it! I used a free debt reduction calculator online and calculated that I will be cutting 11 months off my term and save me $330 in interest. ( This is using my current interest rate of course, which is variable so yes this can change and probably will) .

Another thing I wanted to mention is that if nothing changes with regards to my financial situation, by the end of the year I will have a fully funded $3000 emergency fund! That was the amount I decided awhile ago that would be about 3 months living expenses if I was to lose my job. So I am pretty stoked about that as well!