Decision made. Now what?

OK, it's really great to have a commitment, but let's be honest about New Year's Resolutions. Raise your hand if you've kept one beyond February. See? I don't see any hands. So that is why I am not considering getting out of debt a NYR, but more of a life change. I can live with "life change" but only temporarily, to get over the hump.

So now we have to get started and the first thing my Hubba Bubba and I did was agree to a spending freeze. This is REALLY easy to do right after Christmas when you are a) a little frazzled by how much you spent in the last month, and b) surrounded by lots of cool new stuff . I'm good at cold turkey, it's how I quit smoking and how I became a vegetarian and I've never looked back on either. I'm also good at being poor. I've done that, too. And although I will say that I'm generally happier when I have money, I was pretty happy when I was poor. So the spending freeze has not been a problem for me (we'll talk about HB later). What made me sick, REALLY sick was seeing how I actually spent my money over the last year.

I spent the first week of the New Year reviewing our bank accounts and sorting our spending into categories. I used to use Quicken, which did this FOR me, but that was at least two computers ago, and since Bank of America has this feature as part of their online banking, I just told myself I'd use it there. As if. So, what I should have been doing periodically over the course of the year, I now had to do over the course of the holiday break. And believe me when I say, it took a week to sort it all out. I went through month by month and sorted the spending, researched every check and debit card purchase. OYE!

The thing that boggles me is the waste. It's not just in the money I learned we spent on things like tolls--when we could have changed our EZ Pass plan ($745 vs. $180....DUH!), or the overdraft fees because we didn't transfer money from one account to the other (not even going there), but looking around the house during that week off and facing all of the STUFF that we have that we don't need or use. The stuff is drowning us and making us feel cramped. We complain that the house is too small so I'll go on a tear and decide that I need to organize, but in order to do that I'll need new bookshelves and bins and then Target is $150 richer and we're no better off.

De-cluttering is a process. It's emotional and irrational that I am very willing to donate garbage bag after garbage bag of clothes from my closet, but won't part with any Christmas card I've ever received (you know, you can make all kinds of crafty things out of the fronts of them). Each closet I did took HOURS and if you've been to my house you know that my closets are SMALL.

The treasures I found, though, were not in the long lost items that I'm happily reunited with, but in the MONEY that can be made by selling them!!! See, this excites me. I'm sure that there are people out there who want my books and will give me money for them. And the FABRIC! Oh, Lordy. I am sitting on a goldmine of yet-to-be-made handbags and who knows what else!

But baby steps, here, baby steps. Budget is the first goal. What did we actually spend and what can we cut back on? Do we need to have a house phone, a cable phone for unlimited long distance AND cell phones? Can I commit to handmade gifts only for one year? Every category is being called into question, and yet I'm being realistic. Will I cut out the wine budget? Hell no. But I can scale it back to $30 a month, or two decent bottles. Hey, nobody said this was going to be easy.