New Years Resolution List – Part 1

It’s time to lay down the law. Draw the line in the sand. Figure out some other cliche sayings.

As I wrote before, I’ve never done the whole New Year’s Resolution thing. However, this is the perfect year to do it. A few months ago I created this blog for the purpose of improving myself. Basically, I decided to do New Year’s Resolutions in the fall.

The list is incomplete because I am sure there will be additional things I decide I want to do. I’m ok with that. The point of this list is to find things that I need or want to improve on, and things that I want to make new life habits out of. As such, I won’t be measuring my success by how much of the list I complete versus how much I don’t complete. Instead, I’ll be measuring success on whether or not I make meaningful progress on these items and whether or not I feel like their completion has contributed to positive new life habits or skills.

In other words, if my resolution was to quit smoking, I wouldn’t consider myself to have failed if this time next year I smoked a cigarette a day instead of a pack a day. Rather, the progress I would have made would mean success, and would help me to continue to perfect that habit in the future.

There’s a lot of things I want to accomplish this year, and I’m not done compiling the list yet. To make it a bit easier, I’m going to break down their importance in a series of posts.

So, for the first part of this series I present the following resolutions for 2012.

1. Keep up with this blog – the point of doing this in the first place was to have a way to keep track of my goals, efforts, results, and in turn make me accountable for it all. I fell out of doing that before – and there were negative consequences. Resolution number one is to keep up with the blogging. (I’m cheating a bit here. Breaking down the “resolutions” into multiple posts is partially to help me get in the groove on this goal!

2. Pay down my credit card debt – based on what I have been paying on my cards before, and the amount of payment I want to work into my budget, it looks like I can pay down the debt within the year. I’m not going to lie, that’s pretty exciting. The table of expected outcomes is below. It doesn’t build in finance charges, but I think there’s plenty of cushion for those amounts considering what my payments will be. After I pay them off, I’ll begin the process of some serious saving. It is also possible that I can accelerate these debt payment numbers because…

Card	Amount	Per Mon.	6 months	12 months
Card 1	2030.55	250	1500	3000
Card 2	3033.04	300	1800	3600

3. Develop a side income stream of any size – I am going to be looking for a side income source to use as a way to pay off debt and save some cash. I’m still working on what this will look like – but I constantly come up with new ideas. All I have to do is be diligent about putting them into action and good things will result.

4. Be diligent and dedicated to your gym and training schedule – I have some very specific goals for my training (which I can’t share here for various reasons). I need to be diligent about working on them. I am good about getting to the gym, just bad about doing it consistently on my preferred schedule. That’s going to change! I’ve considered starting a website about it because I’ve seen some other people do that and it has helped them reach their goals. Maybe I’ll get that going.

So, there are four of my resolutions. More coming up later, as we as results on how these are going while I’m listing the remainder of my resolutions. Leave a comment with any suggestions you have for how best to accomplish these goals.