I got a pedometer at work, so I've been trying to keep track of my walking. I think I've got a pretty good average so far, so I think it's time to start working on upping my average. Here's what I've got so far.

Maggie asked how I learned to work on my budget and savings goals. I'm about to give her much more of an answer than I think she bargained for. I talked about this a bit in this post, which was mostly some backstory and where I was at the begining of last year. I didn't really talk about how we got from point A to point B and to where we are now.

There were a few things that helped tremendously in making saving work for me. The biggest was simply the fact that we got the credit cards paid off. The Credit Counseling program we were in was basically a forced Debt Snowball. When we paid that off, it freed up almost $1000 per month, which we determined to put towards other debt and savings. The keys to learning how to do this were largely from a few websites, and a book. The book is The Wealthy Barber. It's a personal finance book that reads like a novel. The advice isn't anything earth-shattering, or even terribly specific, it's just advice presented as if by a close, trusted friend. It didn't so much change how I looked at personal finance, as it changed how I looked at learning personal finance. It no longer felt like math and rules. (Now, I enjoy math and rules for some things. But There has to be an answer at the end, and personal finance isn't like that.) So I began seeking out new resources for learning about finance. Most of what I found was geared at people who were not in my situation. There was a lot of advice about investing, but not as much about getting to the point where you could invest. Much of what was out there focused on finance and finance only. Much of it seemed to only apply if you were in a career field where you worked 9-5, had weekends off, and were making at least $50,000 a year. I saw lots of advice along the lines of "eat out less, go to bars less, go to coffee shops less, go shopping less". While variations of these applied, a lot of it didn't, and it was hard to find information that I felt really applied to me. For the first time though, I not only wanted to make finances work for me, I really needed to make them work for my family.

So I found some blogs. There are several that I like, but two that I identified with and felt spoke directly to me. These are The Simple Dollar and Get Rich Slowly, which has a great forum. The forum on GRS has actually been a huge help. Seeing the successes of others, getting advice, and having an environment to talk about goals with people who are pursuing similar goals adds some serious motivation.

Overall, what I've learned is that reaching the goals (at least for me) requires following the SMART plan (Specific, Measurable, Acheivable, Realistic, Timely) and being accountable to others. That's what the graphs in the sidebar are all about. I've got a lot still to learn, but I'm making progress, and I hope that what I've learned will help others too. I'll try to put up some more specific step-by-step information in the future, and when I figure out how to budget in an effective way, I'll pass that on too. If you have any tips that've helped you deal with money, I'd love to hear about them.

Well... breakfast has been a success. I've had a cup of yogurt with grape-nuts each morning. I'm now starting to switch from the fruit-on-the-bottom to plain yogurt and mixing in frozen fruit. This will remove a lot of ingredients like the infamous high fructose corn syrup. (Considering the ingredients list in the plain yogurt is "milk".) My goal for this week was to assign blocks of time to various tasks. I discovered that my setup was fairly unreallistic. I over-reached in setting up my timeframes. I didn't allow enough downtime, nor did I build enough flexibility into my timeframes. I think I'm going to try to do this one again next week.

So far so good. My goal last week was to drink at least 64oz of water per day. I have, so far, achieved this every day. This week's goal is to eat breakfast every day. I've been having a cup of yogurt with bran grape-nuts type cereal in it. Hopefully this will help me manage my appetite and energy level better.

I haven't made much progress on the budget front yet. Its frustrating, as I don't really know where to start assembling the data. Do you keep a budget? If so, how do you go about it? I want something that's easy to maintain, and doesn't involve a lot of duplicating data that I'm already entering in Money. (The budgeting functions in Money leave a lot to be desired.)

I'm going to try to set some goals for this year. Rather than resolutions, which tend to be the fairly ambiguous, I'm going to try to use the SMART formula for setting the goals. The goals need to be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely.

To this end, I think I'm going to start by setting a monthly goal and weekly goals. The monthly goals will be a project to complete by the end of the month. The weekly goals will be more along the lines of habits I want to work on developing (or breaking). I'll report progress as I go, but I'll need help. I'd appreciate if all you readers keep me honest on this. If I don't update my progress, feel free to harass me about it.

To that end, my first goals are: for the month of January--to create a budget to help reach our new savings goals; and for the first week of the month, to drink at least 64oz of water each day. So... here goes.

So, I've done some math, and I'm way behind on my 101 in 1001 goals. I should be averaging a completion every 10 days. Which means, as of today, I should have 11 items done. I have ten marked as "in progress" and none complete. Oops. Granted, some of these are long term goals, that I could not be done with by now regardless of how dilligently I'd worked on them, but in all honesty I've been slacking. As you've been able to see from my financial recap posts, I've made big strides in that department. Now I need to start making strides in the non-financial management of my life. Any suggestions?

October was an interesting month. We've made a lot of progress, but we're also relaxing a bit on some things. As usual, taxes and rent ate up about 40% of our income (which really isn't terrible). Gas was up, again. Groceries and Dinging Out were up slightly. However with winter coming, we'll probably see that go down a bit as we eat a lot of soup in the winter and soup is cheap. If you notice in the sidebar, the savings numbers actually went down. That's entirely because I made a decision to keep a buffer in the checking account. I've been a bit overly aggressive with moving extra money to Savings, so things have gotten a bit tight when small, unexpected things come up. So what I did was put $500 in the checking account, and then enter a $500 expense on Jan 1, 2007. So that $500 doesn't appear in my running balance. So there's always $500 more in the checking account than what I think there is. Just a safety net so that I can be more comfortable being aggressive with savings.

We'll finish Christmas and Vacation funds this month, and that will leave us with our more long-term goals for savings. Aiden's Headstone is a priority, and we'll probably have that money in place by the end of the year. (Obviously we'll then have to wait till at least spring to get it placed.) After that, one of the student loans needs to get paid off quickly, then it's retirement and house down payment to work on. With almost $40K in student loans still on the table, I'm happy to report that the net worth balance I'm showing is almost $3000 in the black! (granted most of that is in my 401k, so it's not accessible.