Closets? Closets!

OK, yes, it officially took me 35 days to finish step 7 of Out with the Old, in with the New, and, yes, I kind of cheated, because I am giving up on my storage cupboard, which holds another large pile of stuff that I can't bear to give away.  But it's still a win, because I didn't add anything to the storage cupboard and I've got a 30 gallon bag filled with clothing to donate, a few things to try at the consignment store, and my closet went from this to this:

Yay for me!

Now it's on to rethinking my retirement plan (and creating a five year sketch by the end of the month).

2011 Goals

Here we go ...

1) Religious/Spiritual 
     A) Continue to Tithe - one of my big wins in 2010, let's keep the streak going!
     B) Start a daily religious practice - I tried to get really specific about this last year, and ended up burning out. Rather than setting up a to do list, I want to give myself 15 minutes a day where I pray, meditate, read the bible, write in a gratitude journal, sing, or do whatever the spirit moves me to do that day.  Once this is a regular activity, I'll see where my spiritual journey needs to go.

2) Health
     A) Eat within my Weight Watchers points every day - I weighed 169 lbs on the scale yesterday, which puts me 21 pounds over my "thin" weight and 12 pounds over my lifetime weight.  Rather than worry about a time line and a weight goal, I'm just going to eat right and exercise.  I'll re-evaluate in March - if I'm not losing weight, I'll worry about it then.  On that note ...
     B) i. Exercise six days a week - I have Judo 2x a week.  I'll go to the gym the other 4, even if it's just for a light, 20 minute swim.  A sub-goal, because I am this anal, is to ii. make the check-in list at my gym every month.  To get on the list, I must check in at least 17 times a month.

3) Financial
     A) Have a side business (or multiple) netting 1K a month before taxes by December 2011  I've got several ideas on this front, from farm eggs to online jewelry.  I need to just keep plugging away at it until I find something(s) that works.  More on this as events develop.
    B) Fully Fund 2011 Roth IRAs Needed - 10K, currently have 0K - see 3A
    C)  Save in anticipation of (hopefully very temporary) loss of primary income.  It's coming.  The more I can cut from the budget, and the more I can sock away, the longer we'll have before we have to make desperation kinds of decisions.

4) Dreams
     A) Get the farm books in order, facilitate farm improvements, and manage the goats.This year, I am going to take over the farm bookkeeping.  This will free up my Mom to assist the new farm manager into transitioning into his duties, incorporate the new 152 acres into the property, and work on a national lecture tour, which is one of her big dreams.  She's actually speaking at the 2011 Southern Sustainable Agriculture Conference in Tennessee later this month, her first national conference.  I also need to manage the goats more closely.  We've been in growth mode on the herd for a long time, but now it's time to maintain what we have and begin to cull the bottom 10% and replace it with better genetics.  This will require near-daily monitoring to watch for health problems, as well as miscarriages and stillbirths.  It will also require meticulous record keeping.
     B) Begin again on piano  Talked to my dad about this today and we are going to get started again.  My goal is still to be able to accompany at my church on the piano when our current organist is out of town, busy, or sick (our back-up organist is very talented, but she's over eighty, and won't be around forever).
     C) Re-connect with my Chinese friend  We got busy and it stopped happening, but she's a sweetie and I need to spend more time with her.  Also, it's fun to speak Chinese, at least until I run out of words :)

5) Prosaic
     1) Practice with my carry firearms at least once a month This was a big fail for me last year.  I was late getting my Louisiana permit application in last year (long story), so I don't have a valid carry permit and probably won't get one until mid-March at the earliest.  The silver lining is that this gives me time to brush up before I am carrying again.
     2) Consistently do Flylady routines.  Last year, I decided to give up having a housekeeper and do my house myself.  When I follow her routines reasonably consistently, my house is acceptably neat.  I am not trying for Martha Stewart neat, just reasonably not dirty.

Accountability 
In an effort to give myself some accountability, I'm going to review these goals monthly on the first of every month.  Wish me luck (and good health too, please).

Closets ... still ...

I'm still working on step 7, cleaning out my closets and liquidating.  But I'm having some real issues letting any of my clothing go.

I can't find anything in this!

 Does anyone else have this problem?  My closet full of stuff that I never wear, but can't bear to get rid of because I am sentimentally attached to it.  Several years ago, in an effort to break myself of this habit, I gave away (1) the outfit I wore to my wedding reception (4 sizes too big), (2) the outfit I wore to senior prom (I was a 34 B then, I'm a 36D now), and (3) every other thing in my closet that I had not worn for at least a year.  I vowed that never again would I get so attached to my clothing that I kept it beyond all reason and usefulness.

Today, the front third of my closet is full of clothing that I wear all the time and enjoy.  The back two thirds, and my off-season storage closet, are so crammed full of stuff that I have no opportunity to even try to wear any of it.  There are two categories of clothing (1) things that I happily remember the occasion that I purchased/received them every time I look at them, and (2) things that I purchased and have barely ever worn (sometimes never) but which are nonetheless quite cute and still fit, and which I am convinced that I will wear someday, as soon as I have something that coordinates with it.  Anything that is the wrong size or was worn out got purged in my last closet clean. 

So now I am stymied.  In general, I am ready to get rid of things.  I must pare my closet down, so that I can actually get to wearing some of this stuff.  But, in the specific,  I can't seem to let any individual item go.

Does anyone else have this problem?  How do you decide what to let go and/or make yourself do it?

Closet Mess > Willpower

I have been trying to work on step 7 of out with the old, in with the new, clean out your closets and liquidate.   But between having out-of-town guests and the lure of holiday parties, I haven't made much progress.  Tomorrow I need to mail our Christmas cards; I have zero done so far, and last year I sent eighty-three.  This year I'm going to have to pare the list down a bit I think, but if I can get them to the post office by 4pm tomorrow, most of them will arrive before Christmas.  I also need to finish two homemade Christmas presents before Saturday.  So, basically, I don't have much time for anything else, so my goal is to finish step 7 this week and worry about step 8, rethink your retirement plan, next week after Christmas. Wish me luck!

Debt Organization

The Next Steps to "Out with the Old, in With the New" are to clean up your debts and to create a debt repayment plan.  I've been working at this debt repayment thing since 2005, so my debts are pretty consolidated at this point.  I've got three left - 2 interest-free loans from family members, and my student loan consolidation at 1.65%.  So there's not much cleaning left to be done.

As far as repayment goes, I've decided to throw everything at the family loans first, because it bothers me way more to owe money to my family than it does to owe money to a big bank.  Basically, I'm putting aside enough each month to pay family debt #1 in full in June 2011.  Then I will start paying down family debt #2, but I don't anticipate being able to pay it off until July 2012.

In August 2012,  I will start on my student loan, although my plan for it is a bit different.  Since the interest is only 1.65%, I anticipate being able to make more than that, risk free, on a savings account when I can start throwing money at it.  So I plan to save extra money until I have enough in a savings account to pay it off in full, then make that my account for automatic withdrawals and leave it be for the next twenty years or so.

But the reason that my debt is so manageable now is that 5 years ago I did everything on the Simple Dollar clean up list, multiple times.  I played the card transfer game all the time.  Basically, I would find a card that would give me 6 months or more interest free, transfer my debt there, and then pay it  down as much as I could before it was time to transfer it to the next 0% offer.  Eventually, I got a 3% for the life of the loan offer from Amex, transferred all my balances there, and then didn't use the Amex card for years until I had the loan paid back (this was back in the bad old days when credit card companies were allowed to pay off your lower interest rate loans first).  I was always careful not to pay more in fees than I was saving in interest when I did balance transfers.  And it worked: I paid those loans back far faster than if I'd continued to pay off my original balances at the original rates.  So, if you have credit card or other high rate debt, I encourage you to spend some time on bankrate or a similar site and see if you can do any better than you are now.

My Bigest Mistake, and How to Fix It

I thought I would plow through the Simple Dollar's "Out with the Old, in with the New" in order, and #2 is "create a five year sketch."   But it tied in too well with #3 and #4 "figure out your biggest mistake" and "plan how to erase that mistake" to block them out separately.  Because my biggest mistake was giving up my last set of life plans without figuring out where I wanted to go next.

In 2003, I was a shiny new law school graduate, and I knew exactly what I wanted to do: become an associate at a premier law firm in Texas.  That was in the middle of the last recession/depression/economic slowdown, and the market for newly minted lawyers was crap.  Since I couldn't get the associate job right out of law school, I did the next best thing and got a federal clerkship.  I really lucked out and got one in Texas.  It was a two year term, and I figured that would be enough time for the market to pick up and allow me to get the associate job that I wanted.  I wasn't exactly where I wanted to be, but I was on the path.

Clerking was pure misery.  I had waited tables in undergrad, and I thought I hated that.  Clerking was worse.  It was dull, it was monotonous, it required me to keep a set schedule in which I woke up at 7 am every day and  spent eight hours a day catering to the whims of another person.  It was Hell on Earth.  It was pretty much a starting associate position, except the hours were shorter and the pay was worse.  Also, I really liked the judge that I worked for, both as a lawyer and as a human being, and my summer clerkships had already taught me that I could not assume that it would be the same for the partners I might work for.  Life was too short to spend like this, even for the money premier law firm associates made.

So I decided to go to Beijing.  This isn't as weird as it sounds, I had studied Chinese in undergrad and before law school; I wasn't fluent, but I was conversational.  I had always thought I might like to work there.  Unfortunately, Mr. Goat hates China, so he wanted me to be 100% sure that moving to China was what I needed to do before he moved out there with me.  I had a good time, but I decided that it wasn't really for me.  I have a delicate constitution, and I just couldn't hack the pollution; I was sick pretty much continuously.  So in May 2006 I came back to Texas with no real plan for what to do next, and I pretty much did nothing for the next two years.

In March 2008, Mr. Goat got a 100% telecommute job and we moved back to my family's ranch.  I tried ranching full time for a while, and I enjoyed it, but my constitution again got in the way.  In May 2009, I started having some pain in my right hip.  By October 2009, I was pretty much disabled by hip pain and headaches, and it's only been in the last couple of months that I have really started to recover. 

So now we have a full-time manager on the ranch and I am no longer in the work rotation there.  I could work back in, but I am not sure that that is where I would like to be.  I've also got an offer from a friend who works as a broker to mentor me there.  I don't know much about the day to day operations of the job, but she seems to believe that a love for the stock market and complex formulas (which I have) would translate into enjoying what she does.  Also, if I'm going to have children, now is pretty much the time to start.  Or I could give writing for profit a shot, which I have said I was going to do for the last 5 years and have never done (this may be a sign that it ain't gonna happen).

I have a ton of great options to choose from, so what I need to do is decide a direction and start heading toward it.  I just can't seem to make myself decide - some days one thing seems better, some days it's another.  I'm paralyzed by the idea of shutting down so many choices to pursue a path, but what I have now are so many choices that nothing is getting done at all.  I'm beginning to think I should just flip a coin.  But I've decided in the spirit of Out with the Old, in with the New,  that, by the end of January, I'm going to have a five year sketch. 

I'm setting it at the end of January because this is an exercise that will take a lot of thought, time, and prayer for me, and I know that I won't have the mental energy for that for the next two weeks.  But if I don't put a time frame on it, then it's just too easy to push it further and further out on the to do list, and continue to compound the mistake.  Now I have written it out in black and white, with a date, so I have to be accountable to myself for it.

Did anyone else have blocks like mine or problems imagining where they would be in five years?  How did you move past it?

Net Worth Calculation

Per day one of The Simple Dollar's out with the old, in with the new, I calculated my net worth today.  I'm afraid that I'm a bit like Babci when it comes to hard numbers, so I'm not going with exact figures - but although my net worth remains negative, it is about 3% of the negative number I got when I first sat down in 2005 and figured out just how much trouble we were in (answer: a lot).  Basically, since then, we have improved our net worth by paying down debt and saving for retirement.

Paying down debt
This is pretty obvious.  As the debt goes down, the negative side of the net worth calculation goes down, making the positive side count more.  

Additionally, that nasty interest that makes the negative number go up every month, even when you are not adding debt, becomes a smaller and smaller factor.  When we started this journey, we had debt on which we were paying 22% variable .  Now our highest interest rate is a fixed 1.65%.  We got there through a combination of paying down high interest debt and transferring it to places with lower interest. 

Saving for retirement
We are a long, long way from retirement, so the smart place for our money to be is in equities.   Because we didn't panic, and kept our money in (and kept putting money in) through the 2009 crash, our retirement accounts have actually grown past the value of the money we originally invested in them by about 6%, even though we had 2/3 of our money invested before March 2009.  Naturally this number fluctuates every day, but I am comfortable that it will continue to reflect a broad upward trend over the years.

Because most of our net worth is in retirement savings, we also have a big pile of debt remaining.  But I am comfortable with my decision  to put money into retirement accounts rather than debt repayment for two reasons.  First, because the interest rate on our debt is low, so the cost of paying it off over time is low.  Second, because Roth IRAs (where all of our retirement money is located) are a very good deal if you believe that income tax rates will be higher for your tax bracket in 35 years, and putting money into Roths is a use-it-or-lose-it deal every year.   So I am paying the taxes and interest now for the comfort of knowing that, in retirement, my income tax rate on this money will be 0.

Anyway, it has been a while (at least 6 months) since I calculated our net worth, and I was pleasantly surprised by the result.  If we are able to keep up our debt repayment at our current level, we will have a net worth of $0 in 3 months!  This will a huge milestone for us; we have had a negative net worth since day one, as I brought a ton of student loan debt into the marriage. 

Have you calculated your net worth recently?  Was it a surprise or not?

Reflecting on 2010

The year's not quite over, but this year I hope to have my goals and financial plans together by the 1st, so I'm starting with a recap of how well I did this year.  When I made these goals, I was thinking that the surgeries I had just finished and the physical therapy I had just started was going to give me a relatively pain-free year. Unfortunately, it didn't work out that way, but as of October, I think I'm finally getting my medicines in balance and my pain under control without opiates.   


1) Religious / Spiritual:
     A)Never miss church unless sick or out of town.  Win. I've gotten into a good routine vis-a-vis church, so I consistently make it when I am in town.
     B) Participate in a mission or outreach with my church.  Fail. This never really got off the ground.
      C) Read The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language.  Fail (s0 far).  I'm through to Kings.
     D)Write every day in a prayer and gratitude journal. Fail.
     E) Continue to Tithe. Win.  
2) Health
     A) Maintain my weight between 145 and 155 pounds.  Fail (but not too badly).  Today my scale says I weigh 161 lbs, but my weight does fluctuate; last week it was 158.  Not where I want to be, but nowhere close to regaining the 30 lbs.
     B) Swim or do Physical Therapy 4 times a week.  Fail to Win.  Didn't happen for me until July, and I was sick during one month, but I have made it to the gym at least 17 times a month for all of the last 5 months.  I see a big difference in my cardiovascular fitness.
     C) Do Physical Therapy Exercises Every Day. Fail. The exercises didn't end up helping, and I dropped them.
     D) Practice Aikido Every Day.  Fail.  I barely did any aikido this year.

3) Financial 
     A) Pay off loan from relatives in the amount of $1000.  Win. One more debt paid off!
     B) Pay off loan from relative in the amount of $30,000  Fail.  My health did not allow me to find any extra money to pay this off.  I did keep working on it, though, and I should be able to pay it off in July 2011 if everything goes smoothly. (Update 1/1/2011 WIN - got the money together to pay this off in December 2010)
     C) Fully Fund 2009 and 2010 Roth IRAs.  Win.  And this year the stock market actually went up, so there was some advantage to getting it together early.

4)  Dreams
     1) Write something besides this blog. Fail.  I didn't even do a good job writing  on this blog this year.
     2) Learn how to Accompany on the Piano.  Fail.  This fell by the wayside about March.
     3) Get officially affiliated with a dojo.  Fail/Win.  I didn't manage to figure out aikido, but I did find a nice Judo dojo, so I'm back to my Judo practice 2x a week.
     4) Keep up with my Chinese.  Fail.  This fell by the wayside about March.

5) Prosaic
     1) Practice with my carry firearms at least once a month.  Fail.
     2) Keep my house in a reasonable state of neatness.  Fail (but not too badly)  My house never really got neat, but it is not any messier than it was a year ago.


There's a lot of fail there, but a bit of win too.  OK, so the lessons I learned from this to use next year are:


(1) Prioritize goals.  I made myself a wish list and called it "goals," but basically it required too radical a lifestyle adjustment in all areas of my life.  I need to decide what is really important to me and set a few clear goals at a time to really get this to work.


(2) Don't make the perfect the enemy of the good.  On the other hand, I've got several goals that, while I did not succeed, I made some progress.   For instance, I won't be paying off the 30K loan this year, but I did keep throwing money at it, and, barring unforeseen problems, we will pay it off in July.


(3) Sometimes life kicks you in the nadgers.  Some stuff on this list did not get done and should have.  But a lot of stuff just fell by the wayside while I tried to regain a modicum of reasonable health.  Although I should have re-prioritized sometime around March (when I knew that there wouldn't be a quick fix), I kept thinking it would turn out OK and that I'd have time to catch up.


The Simple Dollar is doing a "a daily series focusing on specific activities you can do right now to set the stage for a great 2011."  I'm thinking about using it as my template for resolutions next year.  How are you going to set goals for next year?