I need to stick to and achieve the same personal goals that I have kept for the past few years, so I am going to include them again with some slight modifications.

Blogging-  Goal: 20 post per month

Weight: Goal:  Met and maintain weight of 175. This goal will be considered met each month that weight loss is achieved and once this weight is achieved, each month maintained is considered achieved.

Spiritual-  Goal. I want to spend time reading and or studying the Bible at least 5 days a week for the year.  I started a plan to read the Bible in a year 2 years ago and currently am 80% finished. I want to definitely finish this plan.

My financial plans are definitely different from last year and I am going to include measureable steps to reach each of these. I am going to be upfront and honest. I did some extra shopping today to prepare to start out in January with a bang.

1.  Full Fund the budget each month. Sounds simple but honestly, we have at least 3 categories a month that are not funded without some assistance.  For the month of January I am going to participate in .  If we can eliminate all non-essential spending, it will allow me to fully fund each of our budget categories and start the year on a solid foundation.  I plan to pay on my purchases from JCP with the clothing budget this month. The only clothing want that I am aware of is jeans for Matt. I do expect to receive some reward dollars and hopefully use these to grab at least one pair. I also need to find a good way to sale clothing on line as we are starting to get quite a bit.
2. Establish and maintain an Emergency fund with a monthly deposit of at least $100.
3. Groceries: Goal is for $700. I am going to take this a step further and use only cash for the month of January for groceries. My goal is to spend $200 or less this month. It has become really easy to just purchase things that are on sale or a great deal and I want to focus on using what we have. I do know that we need to add some male body wash and deodorant to the stockpile. I am hoping to find these at CVS over the next month but if not they will go on the list for February.
4. Gas: Spend $400 a month. This should not be too difficulty with gas prices expect to continue to remain under $2.00 a gallon.  In addition we purchased a maintenance  plan with the new van. This fund will continue to cover any repairs and maintenance on the other van. We may need to purchase tires for the new van so this would also need to come from this account. I don’t want to change this amount but instead will use any and all overage to paid down our credit card debit, but will first try to get $500 in a separate fund to pay for tires when needed.
5. Eating Out- After tracking this expense the last 6 months of 2015, I have decided that we need to budget to cover this. $200 will be the amount for each month with roll over for the next month as needed. In January, in the spirit of the Diet, we are going to not spend any money eating out but with two scheduled cheer competitions, I would assume that we may end up spending some of this.
6. Make at least 2 principal only payment to the van.  By completing this, we will reduce our schedule payments by one year. I receive 2 “additional” checks each year so I should be able to use these to cover this goal.
7. Pay at least $10 more than minimum on all credit card debit. I was very hestitant to actually write this goal but I need the accountability of addressing it each month. My ultimate goal is to pay off all credit card debit this year but I want to be realistic so this is my small steps. I will be using our tax refund and most likely both of my “extra” checks to work toward the ultimate goal but I also need to do a small step each month.