Some goals

You know, I used to set goals and try to meet them? I used to be pretty good at it. I fell out of practice when I had D, since most of my time is spent caring for him. Now that he's getting older, I think it's time to set some more goals. Want to know what I am thinking about?

1) Paying off my Student Loans: I am still paying off student loans, if you can believe it. I have about $22,000 in loans myself and Alex has some too, for a total of around $40,000. Ridiculous, right? Especially when we should be saving up for college for our kid. One of my goals is to pay off half of my balance, or $11,555.62 in the next year. I have already put about $5,546.00 toward this, so I have another $6000 to go. I am hoping to have half of my loans paid off by this time next year. At that point, I will start accruing more interest and my loans won't be in deferment anymore (they are deferred while I am a postdoc), but I will just have $11,000 to pay off - no sweat, right?

2) Establish a Morning Routine: I am trying to start a morning routine that I stick to no matter what day of the week it is. Here are some things I would like to do in the morning:

drink a glass of water when I wake up
meditate, reflect, keep a gratitude journal, or some sort of self reflection
take care of the Moo (the cat)
exercise

here are some things we HAVE to do in the morning:
feed and dress D
make lunches
make breakfast, coffee
shower and dress

If I get up around 5 or 5:30, I think I can accomplish all of these things. I'm a morning person, so it shouldn't be too bad. I will let you know how that goes!

3) Save Money by budgeting and Meal Planning: Along the same lines as trying to pay off my student loans, I would really like to start making better financial decisions. This includes getting rid of some of our stuff (we have too much, like most people), following a budget, and planning meals so we are never hitting the grocery store hungry (if this happens, we end up spending $100 for junk food - bad idea!). I've been keeping track of our budget, but I haven't been sharing it with Alex, so that will have to change. And meal planning is such a pain, but it has to be done. I am hoping if I do it for a couple months, I will just have some go-to meals to pull from.

Right now, I am working on how to keep track of these goals - some are obvious - make a loan payment each month, but others are more amorphous. Make sure I get up and do my morning routine 80% of the time? Keep track of how well we budget? Sell X number of things every month? I will have to think about these things. But for now...here are some goals!