1-1-2011

It's 2011 but it feels a lot like 2010.

While I'm close to my goal of 5 cigarettes a day, I broke down and got McDonalds today- but no more!! I'm going to be strong.

Last week I cleaned out a pickle jar and tonight a slapped on a label that said "Money for Car" and I put in two $1 bills. It's a start. I want to buy a car in June.

Last September I read a book called Your Money or Your Life which belongs to my best friend's wife. Actually I only had a chance to read the first 100 pages but I got the idea. The point of the book is that if you handle your money right you can retire much earlier than you think. The writers, a husband & wife team, point out that a lot of people are working just so they can afford to work. When you compare their income to the money they spend on cars, car repairs, take-out food, work-related medical bills, work clothes, ect, some people are actually losing money by working.

Their core belief is that your life and your life-energy are the most important things you possess. And you need to be careful with the way that you spend your time and the product of your life-energy, money.

That means that you have to stop and calculate exactly how much money you bring in, and how much money you send out. Everything, right down to the penny. Once you do that you can clearly see what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong. If it costs you, say, $30 a week for a manicure, you've got to calculate how much of your life and life-energy you're trading away to pay for that and decide if it's worth it.

Anyway, I look around and I see a lot of areas where I'm spending money wrong, buying things I shouldn't. Whenever I buy something now I think, "If I had to sell this, how much, if anything, would I get for it? Is it really worth spending money on?

I stopped buying CDs a long time ago and I never had a lot of DVDs, but I look at people that are so proud of their huge DVD collections and you know that 90% of those DVDs have probably only been watched once and will never be watched again. Some have never been watched and never will be. It's a huge waste and if they went to sell them they'd only get a small fraction of the money back.

I'm very serious about my new attitude towards money. In fact, I'm saving for that car, but once the time comes, my situation may have changed so that I won't really need it as badly and I won't even buy it. I'll just save the money.

We'll see.

Anyway, Happy New Year, and I hope to see you often in 2011.