Weighing Up Positive and Negative Money Influences

2008 has been a mixed year all round for me, so I thought I’d stop and have a look at where I thought my successes and failures have been over the last 12 months, and what that says about me and how I’m doing on this journey to financial freedom…

I lost a lot of momentum in the first half of the year, due to a bereavement.  Would I change this?  Well, I’d certainly change the fact that I lost someone I loved dearly, but I don’t think I can bring myself to care too much about the money and momentum that I lost.  I spent precious hours with people central to my wellbeing, and didn’t give money a second thought – I did what needed doing, and that was that.  As my new year’s resolution was to be nicer to myself, I also refrained from beating myself up about it, as well.

I found, surprisingly, that the biggest obstacle to moving forwards was myself.  Time after time I found myself throwing up roadblocks to my progress.  Because I no longer answer to a “boss”, I am in charge of my own journey, and whilst I don’t find that scary, I do find it challenging.  If I could ask for anything in the world, I think I would ask for the ability to stay focussed on the task in hand and not to go wandering off at a tangent every two minutes.

This year I finally admitted to myself that I might be scared of success, and that’s the reason that I’m sabotaging myself with my lack of attention.  Next up – ways to deal with that, and stay on target.  That’s going to be the hard thing.  I’m currently reading Tim Ferriss’ “The Four Hour Work Week”, and his comments about setting yourself artificially short deadlines is really reverberating with me.

Next week is going to be a week of accomplishment, I’ve decided, so watch this space to see if I really can achieve that!  I’ve set myself two deadlines for projects that have been chugging away very slowly in the background, and if I can get my head around those then I think I can consider myself back on track.

In terms of cutting costs, I think I’ve done extremely well.  Our grocery budget is much lower than other families of my acquaintance, and putting the heat on is a bit of a red-letter day.  We’re burning free wood (my husband works in the construction industry amongst other things, so wood offcuts are easy to come by), and planning for making better use of our vegetable plot (”allotment” in Britain)  this year.  We’re eating a lot of home-produced food at the moment – particularly meat, which is much better for us, the environment and our budget.  We are consolidating bills by moving out of our current house and into our smaller holiday cottage next door.  It’ll be difficult in terms of space, but will make space heating and bill payments much easier.  We’re only running one vehicle and have sourced some free vegetable oil for the purposes of bringing the fuel bill down once the weather heats up a little (50/50 veg oil and diesel only works well in spring, summer and autumn – winter temperatures make the oil thicken and has a tendency to clog up the fuel pump on the car).  Once we move next door to the holiday cottage we will have access to free digital tv, so we will also be cancelling our satellite subscription.  If I could figure out a free way of pumping our well water to toilet cisterns and the washing machine I would be even happier, but I don’t do practical stuff like that.

On the whole, I’m feeling pretty good about the advances we’ve made towards coping in a more difficult economic situation.

My husband is slowly but steadily transitioning away from the construction job which he currently works at, and towards the music job which he loves.  We’ve been complimented on how brave we are at making this transition, but I fail to see any bravery involved – he’s effectively working two jobs at the moment (construction during the day, music during the evenings and weekends), and not dropping construction work until he’s got other things to fill the time and wage-gap.  It’s not a brave leap into the abyss, but rather a measured move towards sanity…

On the failure front, after a successful period of bringing our credit cards down to a really sensible level, we ran them up again with two visits to the US last year.  I really took my eye off the ball on this one, and pushed the boat out as it was a bit of a “once in a lifetime trip” for both my son (one trip) and my husband and I (second trip).  Whilst we *can* afford the payments on the new balance, it doesn’t leave us enough to overpay in the way that we were doing before, and I’m unhappy with that.

My lack of ability to stay on target is the biggest failing of the year, and the one that I feel most unhappy about.  It’s time to address that – any suggestions as to tools and tactics for addressing this problem would be greatly appreciated.  I have toyed with the possibility of taking my laptop and working elsewhere – a coffee shop in town perhaps.  However, fuel money, parking and refreshments mean that this is going to work out to be a very expensive option.  What I need to do is to find a way to do all my household chores and then switch speed to working without getting distracted by social networking or general browsing (damn online papers!).

Things that I feel positive about for the upcoming year:

• Ramping up several musical projects into better paying options
• Working on our new house and hopefully moving in sometime late summer
• Putting together a new project with a friend, which has the possibility to make money in otherwise dead time
• A couple of writing projects which require research that will be fun to do, and hopefully marketable in the long run

So, the next thing is to set myself a couple of tight deadlines, pull myself up by the bootstraps and just get on with the business of moving forwards.