3 Year Plan

Part of making this grand plan work is ensuring that my personal/home life is completely in order before I take the leap.  If you’re going to live and work in the same place, it’s essential to make sure that that place is running like a well-oiled machine!

As a single mom, time is short.  My daily commute is about 3 or more hours round trip (including daycare drop-off), my son has soccer practice and a game each week (which is another hour round trip each time!), extracurricular activities like play dates and birthday parties, and frankly, there is no one else to rely on when he’s not really in the mood to get dressed in the morning!  I do not get a break every other weekend; I have sole custody and there is no visitation.  We do not have any family nearby and are, for the most part, on our own.  I have close friends who are wonderful, but the day-to-day is up to me.

Our life can be hectic–everyone’s can–but I plan to make every effort to eliminate as many inefficiencies as I possibly can so that I can get down to the true goal of creating a thriving home business that allows for more time with my son.

In coming weeks/months, I hope to share some of my accomplishments toward increasing the effiiciency of our household and hopefully progress a little further into our 3yearplan!

This week I was able to make a little progress:

Cut costs and stockpile money: Groceries were a bit higher this week at $31.61 but I’m still well within the $160/mo. budget with $110.67 left for the next two weeks. Here is the link to our shopping trip info.

Along those same lines, I realized that there were tons of other people out there who are starting to set grocery budgets and use coupons.  So for the first time ever, I posted the coupon matchups and deals at Publix (my favorite grocery store) so that others can jump in on the deals.  I compared the sales that are currently going on to the printable coupons that are available right now and also to the coupons that were in recent flyers.  I do this anyway on a weekly basis so it isn’t much of a stretch to add in a weekly post on Fun Family Tips.

I wasn’t sure what kind of response to expect from my readers–so I was pretty excited when someone contacted me the following day to ask if they could link to my Publix matchups on a weekly basis from their blog. Very exciting!

Now I’m thinking about doing the same coupon/deal matchups for CVS and Walgreens because I often hit those sales as well.

Fun Family Tips is growing by the way! I’m excited to say that I saw a significant increase in traffic to the website over the past month, making this my highest traffic month ever! WOOHOO!

Build a light box for photographing jewelry – BUILT IT!!!!! So freaking proud of myself too! AND…really happy with the results! I used the directions posted here on WikiHow, modified them a bit and built this simple little box that has DRASTICALLY improved my pictures already.  I still need to play with the lighting a bit, but this should help with another one of my goals Get back to listing daily on Etsy (which will be a big focus for the coming week).  I will share some of the photos shortly–so far I’m just doing test shots, trying to figure out the lighting…

I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t touch the craft room since my last post…I actually haven’t even stepped foot in the rooms since my last post! Hopefully I can get it over with soon! I’m tired of it hanging over my head so I hope to knock out the last little bit soon!

This week, I made some significant progress on one goal in particular: Organize and consolidate my craft rooms.

I wish I had taken some before pictures of my old craft room…but if you’re a creative person, I’m guessing that you’ve probably gone through the craft-room-looks-like-a-bomb-exploded phase too.  That’s pretty much explains what I was dealing with.  So, I took a vacation day from work, sent Little Man to daycare, and spent 8 full hours on a very focused cleaning and consolidating of my craft rooms.  Believe it or not, I’ve still got some work ahead of me…but I think I can probably knock the rest of it out in a few hours on the weekend/nights.

One of the big problems in my previous craft room was that I couldn’t see very many of my crafting options (colors, textures, etc.) making it a less-than creative environment.  I’ve really made an effort to fix that in my new craft room.

A bulletin board was hung to organize my beads in a location that I can see them.  I still have to get a bunch of poly bags to hang the rest of them, but this is a great start!  The bulletin board was an awesome $1 yard sale find.

The spice rack that will eventually become home to my glitter collection was hung.  Both the spice rack ($2) and the wire organizer thingamajig below it ($4) were awesome yard sale finds.

A scrapbook paper organizer was constructed from a wire rack organizer and zip ties – $12.99 on sale at Target.

This awesome paint rack holds more paint than I own for now (guess I should have photographed the backside–it’s pretty full), but it’s much better for keeping my paint VISIBLE ($7.99 with a 40% off coupon at A.C. Moore).

I moved my book shelf  (craft books, ideas, etc.) into my new craft room.

I also did a MASSIVE cleaning of the other craft room and put items into individual storage bins to give everything a home. This was definitely a GREAT use of a vacation day AND, I still was able to pick Little Man up early for some quality time.

Cut costs and stockpile money: I made a little bit of progress here as well.

1. I set my first grocery budget: $160 per month.  This was the first week on the budget and I stayed well within at $17.72.  You can read more about my shopping trip here and a bit more about how I spend so little on groceries here.

2. I made my own dishwasher detergent.

3. I figured what my expenses are.  It’s incredibly hard to budget without knowing where your money HAS to go.  Here’s the monthly breakdown:

• Mortgage: $1429.60
• Phone/Internet: $83.75
• Security System: $22.99
• Car Insurance: $65.61
• Car Payment: 269.91
• Sewer: $37.90
• Cell Phone: $72.98
• Electric: ~$150
• Water: ~$19
• Trash: $48.43
• Groceries: $160
• Gas: $80

Total monthly (necessary) expenses: $2440.17

My 401K loan (that I took out to cover my custody battle) is taken directly from my paycheck before I ever get it, so it did not make the list above.

So there’s the weekly goal check-in.  See ya soon!