Having a goal each month really helps drive me toward making progress, even if I don’t quite reach them all.  I don’t want to make goals that are too easy to accomplish just to be able to complete them every time.  I’d rather fall just short and get a lot more done!

Here’s the goals for this month:

1. Reduce overall debt by $1000.  Last month was $2000, but half of that was medical expenses that got paid from my flex spending account.  This month I only have about $200 of medical expenses outstanding.  I think 1K is reasonable, but not too easy.
2. Continue evolving our envelope system.  It’s going to take awhile to get our system where we want it.  Another successful month under our belt will simply strengthen our habits.
3. Finish my debt scales page.  Ok, I’ve put this one off long enough. Time to just get these out there.
4. Revive my daily journal entries again.  Starting with my next budget update to the site this weekend, I’m going to be doing journal entries again.  I did much better tracking incoming and outgoing money when I was doing this, and it’s taken a back seat to other developments for too long.
5. Release the forums!  Yet another development project I’ve been tinkering with too much.  They’ve been "coming soon" for almost half a year now.  Lame.

There’s lot of other things I want to do, but I’m going to focus on these main things this month along with keeping up with a regular posting schedule.  We’ll see at the end of the month where we are with it! 

Earlier in the month I stated my goals for March.  I’m going to list each goal and talk about how things went.  Overall, I think we did pretty good.  I think I’ll give myself a grade of about 80%, so there’s definitely some room for improvement here.

1. Reduce overall debt by $2000.  We managed to drop $2027.77 in debt this month.  Considering I had to replace the garage door opener (~$200) during this time, I think we did great.  This doesn’t count a ~$60 finance charge that’ll apply tomorrow, so I’m actually just under my goal in my mind.  Most of this is medical bills that got paid right out of my flex spending plan from work as well.  This also doesn’t count the money we just spent for our last two trips that we’d already planned before going on a budget.  I finally bought the plane tickets this month, but we paid cash for all but one.  The other will be paid by next month.  This completely concludes planned vacations for a long time.
2. Follow the envelope budgeting system.  I posted how we created and maintain our system earlier this month.  It’s really been helpful, and we stuck to it almost perfectly.  There was a couple of things that we didn’t account for and had to pull money from our little miscellaneous stash to accommodate for them.  I think the cash habit is here to stay though!
3. Complete the separation of my daily journal from the main blog and their respective feeds.   I finally did it, but I haven’t picked up my daily journal routine since.  This will definitely be addressed in the next month.
4. Finish my debt scales page that shows the breakdown of individual debt progress, not just the overall on the header.  I totally blew this one off.  This is the source of most of my bad grade this month.
5. Follow a new schedule that I’ve created for myself on running this blog.  I’m pretty happy with most of the month.  The last week I’ve gotten so little sleep that I just couldn’t seem to finish doing any polishing on my posts.  So they’re all still sitting in my queue here waiting for me to get them post-ready.  (For large posts, I write drafts a week or two in advance, then polish them a day or so before they go out.)  I think there’s room for improvement, but I’m still getting used to a routine amongst my chaotic life.

So, I think we did pretty good financially.  Even with a $200 setback for a garage door opener, we managed to stick to our plans.  The rest of my report mostly concerns the blog itself, which is something I hope to improve on now that our financial progress is on track.

I’ve got a number of things that I’d like to accomplish.  This is my first attempt at actually trying to set some goals and see where I measure up over time.

As much as I’d love to just make my only criteria numbers and dollars, there’s a few other things that I want to measure in order to make sure I’m successful this month.  I’ll include some of the dollar amounts too, just because they are important, but they’re all based on what I have in my budget.

1. Reduce overall debt by $2000.  (I’m already $3000 BELOW WHERE I STARTED on my debt scale.  That’s HORRIBLE and we’re gonna try to fix it ASAP.)   Half of this is medical bills that I’ll be reimbursed for from my flex account, but I’ll take it. 
2. Follow the envelope budgeting system we’ve created and use automatic payments for all bills using our web bill pay.  This includes modifying the amounts and categories as needed to gradually reflect our actual needs.
3. Complete the separation of my daily journal from the main blog and their respective feeds.
4. Finish my debt scales page that shows the breakdown of individual debt progress, not just the overall on the header.
5. Follow a new schedule that I’ve created for myself on running this blog.

I think if I can just focus on those key things, the rest of the goals that I also want to accomplish will fall into place.  I need to learn to just pace myself, and so far I’m not doing so hot.  Soooo, we’ll actually create some measurable goals and see how things go from there.