Living an Authentic Life

Authenticity refers to the truthfulness of origins, attributions, commitments, sincerity, devotion, and intentions. 2010 is all about living my authentic life.

In December I worked too much and hemorrhaged money in order to fulfill the commercialism of the holiday and am really ready to move on to a New Year. I am giving serious thought to taking a vacation over the holidays next year to somewhere nice and warm.

I have not been the best about keeping my goals in front of me and I resolve to do much better in the coming year. The course of my life is screaming for a change and the only way that will happen is by changing the way I do things.

So without further ado here are the year end numbers...

Savings - $568.48
Cash on Hand - $762.27
Retirement - $18,841.51 (combined yikes)
Home Value - $175,000.00
Mortgage Debt - $149,103.27
Loan Debt - $34,121.25
Credit Card Debt - $4,633.40

Total Net Worth $7,314.34

Goals for the coming year.....

Financial

• Savings - $3000.00
• Retirement - $22,500.00 (combined yikes)
• Home Value - $185,000.00 (unless we buy a new house)
• Mortgage Debt - $148,000.00
• Loan Debt - $24,600.00
• Credit Card Debt - $0

Total Net Worth - $37,900.00 (not including cash on hand)

Personal

• Take a real vacation (fly to somewhere warm)
• Revamp blog
• Learn Italian (CD's in the car while commuting)
• Get down to goal weight
• Finish all condo projects
• Buy a house (this is tentative)
• Create a Steampunk wardrobe
• Work on career change
• Declutter
  

So far today I have gotten all of the Christmas decorations down and they are all sitting on my dining room table. I want to get that put away by the weekend. I have already made minimum payments on four of my five credit cards and balanced the checkbook. To meet my health goal for the year I want to sit down and make out a grocery list so I can shop for healthy food for the week.

I think I will buy myself a notebook to use as a journal for the year. This will be where I can put my lists of things that need to get done etc. Seeing the numbers above makes me realize even more how important it is to get out of debt and increase our retirement savings.

Here is to 2010!