January down!

2011 is 1/12 of the way over, so I wanted to update my progress (or lack thereof).

1) Take a photography class: I'm about 2/3 of the way through my photography class. I am learning a lot. I need to put what I learn into practice more. I have also signed up for willete's joy of love online class, which runs the month of February. More on that tonight, hopefully.

2) Take pictures of the kids every month: well, I'm doing this, but still struggling to get the kids to cooperate. I have some great shots of them individually, but not a fantastic one of them together. Since E started crawling at the beginning of January, it has been so hard to get her to sit still or even stay anywhere near her brother. She is off and into everything! I plan to upload some pics tonight from home

3) Create - and actually stick to - a budget: I created a budget, and then blew it out of the water. It's not tragic because we also sold a car that we don't need to replace. The main cause of us going over budget was both of the kids outgrowing their clothes at the same time. I feel like I am doing better at keeping spending down though.

4) Plant a vegetable garden in the spring: Have the broccoli started, but I may have screwed something up. The Square Foot Gardening book that I am using said that you could plant 5 or so seeds per cup when you start the seeds. I tried that, but I put 5 seeds all in the same little hole in the cup, so I think they are too close together. I am going to try to salvage at least one of that plants this weekend by moving it into another cup. I am not too hopeful since I am a first-timer, but we'll see how it goes. I am also going to start my onion seeds this weekend. Hopefully they will fare better.

5) Build a bookshelf for E's room: I haven't started this yet. Still haven't finished the ledges I am building for the kitchen. We have all the supplies needed for that project, but our garage is too messy.

6) Organize the garage and bonus room. My sweet husband is working on these two tasks. I really wish I had taken before pictures of each. Sunday he tore down a huge, not-functional-for us shelving unit in the garage. Our hope is to put in shallower shelves and a work bench in another part of the garage. Right now we don't really have any work space, so it's difficult to do some projects. The bonus room looks a lot better since we move all the Christmas decorations and boxes into the attic, but it still needs much improvement.

7) Run a 5K. This is off the table until June. I don't run while nursing.

All in all, I am pretty pleased with our progress. The kids were sick for a couple weeks and my husband worked non-stop for the first couple weeks of the month, so I'm happy we accomplished what we did. Heck, I'm just happy to have survived this month.

Bring on February!

Budget has been created!

So I finally sat down and created our 2011 budget today. I also balanced our checkbooks and updated all of our account balances. I had a certain number that I wanted our net worth to be by the end of 2010. It didn't happen. Partly because I realized that our house is worth much less than I had been figuring, but mostly because we've spend a lot of money this year and haven't saved much. We should be able to reach that milestone by the end for 2011. We'll see what happens.

The new budget includes a pretty aggressive savings plan. We didn't spend any money today, so we're under budget for the year. Woo hoo! However, we need to go to the grocery store, Costco and Lowe's tomorrow. All of these things are very dangerous for us, so hopefully we can stick closely to our lists.

Money on My Mind: Goal 3

Creating a budget. Blah. This is the goal that I am least excited about, and most unsure that I will accomplish. Many of my other goals are fun. Gardening: YAY! Taking pictures of my cute kids: adorable! Creating something all by myself with just some boards and screws: awesome! Reclaiming our storage space: Yippee (okay maybe that is a stretch). Budgeting: Blah. Actually, I enjoy creating budgets. That's no problem. The problem is with the second part of the goad - sticking to the budget. This is also the hardest goal to blog about because financial situations are delicate, and people get all judgey when you talk about how you spend your money.

Don't get me wrong. I am (mostly) good with money. We save some. We contribute a large percentage of our income to retirement. We have minimal debt (mostly student loan debt for our graduate degrees). We save for college. We live within our means, for the most part.

We also waste a lot of money. We don't buy a lot of stuff, but it feels some some of our money just flutters away in the wind. I track our spending on using online tools, but when I see how much money we spend on food it makes me a little sick to my stomach. We could be smarter with our money, and that is why I have set goal #3. There are some big ticket purchases that I would like to make (new dining room furniture, new living room furniture, new bedroom furniture - seeing a theme?), but with so much of our money fluttering off in the wind (or into my belly), it's not going to happen any time soon.

To prepare for this goal, I have set up electronic transfers to increase the amount we are saving starting in January. I also have set up our electronic bill pay to increase the amount that we pay toward our HELOC. A few weeks ago, I had the following conversation with my husband:

Me: We really need to set up a budget and try to stick to it.
Him: Yeah, we do.
Me: We should talk about that some time.
Him: Yeah, we should.
Me: I'm hungry. I think I'm going to bake some cookies.

Next steps: Set time aside to work with my husband to create that budget. Start tracking spending on January 1.