Goals, Life, Me, Myself & I

2015 New Year’s Resolutions of a Thirty-Something Gal

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Wow, 2015 is here! Time for new resolutions!! So can you believe it is fifteen years after the big new millennium?! Y2K bug! Ahhh! My gosh, how time flies!

2015 New Year's Resolutions of a 30 SomethingAnyhow, I’m a list kinda gal and know that I am much more likely to get things done if I write to-dos down and get to cross them off once completed. Sooo satisfying. Done – check! Most years I like to write down resolutions or goals for the year ahead. I actually have a notebook dedicated to just that and in previous years I went as far as drawing 52 boxes for weekly goals to check things off. Worked really well!

Last year I really only had two personal goals: Plan our wedding! Plan our honeymoon! I’m hoping I’ll have a little more time for other things in 2015 but usually life tends to be amazingly busy these days.

This year, these are my goals:

  1. Start my own marketing consulting business
  2. Connect with my friends
  3. Host Sunday Suppers / Entertain at our beautiful house
  4. Up our house’s curb appeal. Those dead scrubs blend in well in winter but the rest of the year… not so much.
  5. Work out at least once a week
  6. Catch-up with my Project Life photo albums
  7. Create our wedding photo book
  8. Blog here at least once a month (that seems little but it’s realistic)
  9. Nurture my marriage and do awesome things that we may want to do before we potentially have kids (I realize this is an abstract goal and as such I really despise it so I will have to break it down into more tangible S.M.A.R.T. goals *business geek*)
  10. Eat well. Live cleanly. Be well. A.k.a. increasingly remove pesticides and chemicals, etc from our food and home, eat nutritious meals, be greener.

I hope to see you here, on Facebook or in person to check in on how I’m doing with my resolutions. Care to share your goals?

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Goals, Health

Half Way to 2014

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And just like that in what seemed like a blink of the eye half of 2013 has already gone by. Time to check-in on my self-imposed goals for the year!

Looking into my awesome purple New Year’s resolutions book, it seems that I’m doing really well with some resolutions but I’m really slacking with others, too (hello total lack of crafting so far!). Let’s take a look at the health related ones:

Working out at least once a week: 17/26. Ehhhhh. Not too bad considering all the bad colds and the completely messed up neck I had but in honesty, LOTS OF ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT. I think once we move I’ll be able to make more room for that AND I won’t have to worry about upsetting downstairs neighbors for doing jumping jacks etc. Am actually considering joining the gym again as we’ll live really close to not one, Peeps, but two! I do miss my pilates classes and treadmills just make for better cardio workouts on hot or rainy days. Good outlook for the second half I’d say!

Speaking of, Car-Di-Oh! I’ve had running a 5k on my bucket list for the longest time and there is really no good excuse as to why I haven’t done it yet. Other than it being too hot, too rainy, too thunderstormy (I mean who wants to be struck by lightning?!). Again, join-gym idea might be the key here.Car-Di-OhSo I am hoping 2013 will be the year. I’m up to running 4km, which knowing what a non-runner I am, that is HUGE! Next up, sign up for a race and manage to run 5km. It’d be soooo embarrassing to walk across the finish line!
I do have a cool running app on the iPhone that tells me time and distance and tracks my runs via GPS. Who doesn’t love seeing progress?!

LunchScrap the crap lunches!
That was my third health related resolution and I am absolutely rocking this one! I used to eat a “Barely-There Cuisine” frozen lunch almost every day at the office. It was convenient, cheaper than eating out and fast with a good variety of meal choices. But that nagging feeling that maybe chicken with rice and vegetables should really only have something along the lines of these ingredients: Chicken, Rice, Carrots, Peas, Oil, Spices and not a 10 line long list of sodium loaded non-pronouncable foods and chemicals drove me to set this goal: Only eat one frozen lunch a week.

And honestly, I’ve gotten so disgusted by the idea of eating all that processed crap that I’ve eaten a total of six (6!!!!) frozen lunches this entire first half of the year! Yessssss! When I do, it’s usually a Kashi vegan one that only consists of pronounceable ingredients. Super proud of this one and it should be fairly easy to continue the healthy lunches! *Fist pump*

Still have a few more resolutions for the year but all in all they are going well and I really enjoy checking off my check boxes and pat my own shoulder. Teeeheee. How about yours? Hope you haven’t given them all up just yet 🙂

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Goals, Me, Myself & I

Being Foxy – A New Year’s Resolution

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A little bit ago I wrote about my Goals for 2013. One of them is being foxy and save up some dinero to purchase a cute LoveHouse (awwww) or a new car in case mine decides to die (noooo!).

The German philosophy to money is to save and then spend and not spend and then pay off debt and so I was fairly nervous about moving to the States without a rainy day fund (and not much of a credit history to open credit cards so no taking advantage of philosophy #2 either.). Well, I’ve lived here for over five years now and have been lucky enough to afford furnishing my apartment, purchasing a cute, used car and even to create a little rainy day fund. And let’s be honest, something I don’t want to skip: plane tickets home gobble up quite a bit of any foreigner’s savings, too.

Somehow though I feel really behind in saving up money for grown-up purchases like real-estate or car down-payments let alone fabulous trips to fabulous places. And while I realize I am FAAAAAAR better off than lots of people in this world (#FirstWorldProblems) I decided to be a little more aggressive with my savings this year and set a formal monthly goal.

I’ve been doing OK so far. As you can see, February didn’t go as planned but zee car didn’t start and needed to be towed (“No Ma’am, it does not sound like the battery is dead, I know from experience what that sounds like! So can you just send the tow truck, please?”). Ah well. No stress. I’m hoping that I can make that up later in the year!

San has a great list of suggestions on how to save money on her blog. And just like her, many of the traditional saving suggestions like “Don’t buy fancy coffee every morning” I also don’t do. I don’t restrict myself to a weekly budget either and am just trying to make foxy moves and cut-out unnecessary spending. OK so Alfi got a new toy from PetSmart but it was his birthday this week!!

The one thing I do love is catching foxy sales. The weekly e-VIC special (one or two items on super sale for one day) from Harris Teeter (our supermarket) is something I look forward to every Friday. And I admit, I get super excited when they have toilet paper for less than $5 on there like this weekend. That’s $10 and 24 rolls of TP into my savings right there. Bam! Yes, I go Bam! over toilet paper deals. Man, I feel old! 🙂

I also try to throw trips to Aldi instead of the regular super market in for kitchen staples (and hello Aldi pro-biotic yogurt 4 pack for ~$1.70 compared to $2.50 for that active sounding brand elsewhere.). I’m really not an intense couponing chick that monitors triple coupon week and buys 3 copies of the Sunday paper (in fact, that scares me) but when one comes up online for something I use anyway, you betcha I’ll try to cash in on that. They usually have pretty awesome printable ones here.

Of course y’all know about Groupon, Living Social etc by now but I almost find I save the most by not purchasing them at all unless I have very specific plans! 😀

So as you can see I don’t have a strict budget but just having a formal goal for me has been the working quite well and hopefully this New Year’s Resolutions Goal will be reached throughout the year! #That-Grown-Up-Thing-Where-You-Set-Financial-Goals

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Goals, Me, Myself & I

Take on The New Year – My 2013 Project

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Not even two full months into the year and I am already behind one of my resolutions: Blogging twice a month. Well, twenty-four times that is so I suppose I can still catch up on that one! 😉

A few years ago in 2013 I created a great New Year’s Challenge and it really helped to make a conscious effort to live life more to the fullest. The intentions had always been there but who doesn’t love checking off boxes after tackling a task or reaching a goal. I did lovingly subtitle the 2010 project “Sandra’s semi-neurotic quantification of New Year’s resolutions – a year long project”. It was great fun and I did complete quite a few of my goals.

Being 30 and turning 31 in ’13 feels like a great time to reflect on my life and make a conscious effort to live an even better one so I decided to have another challenge this year. There are a few goals that are repeats (like FINALLY running a 5k race) and a few are completely new (like the jewelry making related ones).

This year’s categories are: Health, Home, Fun, Sannipanni Jewelry, Finance, Personal Development and Miscellaneous. Stay tuned to see what I’m up to and what goals are in those categories! What about you? Any goals for this year?

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