3 Year Plan

You may see FFT throughout my blog and wonder what it is.  If you were reading this blog up until this point, you would know exactly which website it is…seemed like a great idea at the time…unfortunately, I cannot share the URL to that blog in any way that connects it to this blog.  Why? It all started with Facebook!

I thought it would be a good idea to create a Facebook fan page.  I casually invited a couple of my very close friends who I work with who already know my 3yearplan.  One of them casually invited about 1000 people to become fans.  Sounds great, right? Nope. A number of those 1000 people are colleagues at my day job.

Plotting to walk away from my day  job in 3 years does not exactly look great in the corporate world…so…I had to eliminate the connection between the two blogs.  The other is still up, so if you know what it is, great! If not, I’m sorry…it’s a great blog! BUT…gotta protect my job for the next 3 years!

If you are interested in the URL, you’re welcome to PM me, but I won’t be posting it for the world to see anymore…so…FFT it is!

It took over two months, but I am pleased to say that I finally realized that I was doing it wrong

My RSS icons were pointing to wordpress feeds of my content and not to the Google feeds (which contain the GoogleAds!).  Lesson learned: Don’t trust the presets!

Problem solved!

I created my first blog button for FFT!!! I was so proud of myself! Movin’ right along!

Guess I need to add a goal of: make blog buttons for 3yearplan and HolidayCraftProjects, huh?

This wasn’t the most productive week…

I *did* find most of my tax paperwork and put it all together in a folder and I *did* make 4 pieces of jewelry.  I didn’t get back to listing on Etsy yet or photograph any of the jewelry…

Here’s my weekly update on…

Cut costs and stockpile money – my grocery bill for this week came to $81.92 ($34.29 at Publix, $47.63 at Walmart), meaning that I came in $6.50 under budget for the month.  Now, I started my month at a weird time (see below) and I want to fix that so I don’t confuse myself or others…so for the next couple of weeks (until the end of March), I’ll be working with a reduced budget of $80.  Then I will resume of $160/mo. grocery budget.

So I want to touch on how I *didn’t* save money this week:  I bought patio furniture.  This is a purchase that I have been planning for a while and had budgeted $1500 for.   I wanted the furniture because I have a great screened in porch on my house and never really use it because there isn’t any furniture out there.  Now, not only do I get to enjoy it, but it will look much nicer when I prepare to sell my house.  I ended up finding this great set for only $698.00 on Walmart.com though and I chose site-to-store to get free shipping , so I still saved hundreds of dollars off my budget.  So…here it is:

And that is my less-than-productive week in a nutshell.

Another productive week has gone by! I have to say, having this weekly check-in (even if I’m only talking to myself right now) is really keeping me motivated! I worked on some existing goals and added in some pretty important ones as well.  Here’s a look at the existing goals:

Begin advertising on Holiday Craft Projects and this blog: If you visit Holiday Craft Projects (and if you’re looking at this blog right now) you’ll notice something new! GoogleAds! I’m still perfecting the sizing/placement, but I’m happy that they’re there!

Upgrade my existing blogs: This one was scary.  It is something that I have procrastinated on for over a year because I was terrified that I would lose absolutely everything in the upgrade.  I knew nothing about backing up my sites’ files and I knew nothing about upgrading an SQL database to use the latest version of Wordpress.

So, I took another full day off work and sat for 3 hours following printed instructions from Wordpress.org step-by-step. I upgraded Holiday Craft Projects first because I wouldn’t lose as much if the upgrade went poorly.  It took 3 solid hours to upgrade Holiday Craft Projects–but was well worth it and upgrading FFT was (almost) a piece of cake–just 20 minutes!  Now that I’ve upgraded, there is an auto-update feature so I don’t have to put myself through that nerve-wracking 3 hour experience again! WELL worth the time!

Cut costs and stockpile money:

1) Grocery-wise, this was another successful week when it came to saving money.  I spent $22.25 and still have $88.42 left of our $160/mo. grocery budget and only 1 week left until the end of our “month” (I probably shouldn’t have started the month in the middle of a month–that’s just plain confusing).

2) I am also now using my credit card exclusively for bills & purchases that are not automatically deducted.  This may sound crazy, but since I pay my balance off every two weeks, I don’t pay interest on my purchases.  My credit card gives me points which can be turned in for small amounts of cash.  This means that I’m actually earning money by shopping this way.

It sounds like a hassle, but if you think about it in terms of an hourly rate, it makes total sense to do this if you have a reward credit card.  I would have made the purchases anyway–I don’t look at it as credit and I don’t lavishly spend on myself just because I’m using plastic.  I just shop and pay bills as normal.  Every two weeks, I take less than 2 minutes to review my balance and make a payment online for the full balance.  In return, I earn a $12.50 check approximately once a month.  It takes me about a minute to fill out a deposit slip and toss the check in the mail (I bank online).  That’s 5 extra minutes per month to deal with my finances in this manner–making the “hourly rate” for doing this $150.00.  Now obviously, I only earn the $12.50-not $150.00, but I would definitely consider it time well spent.

And now for my added goals:

Redesign FFT: It looked a bit messy to me and it was difficult to scroll through all of the posts to find anything.  I tried to look at it as a reader–and realized that there was no way I would sit there reading forever trying to find the interesting parts.

I combined a lot of the categories and created more subcategories (this didn’t exist on the old version of Wordpress and it’s pretty sweet!).  You can now navigate the site much easier and it looks a LOT more professional.  Still a work in progress…but I think it looks pretty good!  Would love to hear your feedback!

Redesign Holiday Craft Projects: I liked the new look of FFT so much that I’ve decided to redesign Holiday Craft Projects as well.  Stay tuned!

Some more recent news? Visits to FFT are up! I can’t disclose by how much because of my agreements with some advertisers (although you can dig around on the internet to find the info if you’re determined)–but I’m pretty happy with the steady growth.

I was also approached by a photographer who is interested in building their portfolio and had heard that I made jewelry.  They have an upcoming fashion shoot with a new designer and asked if I would be interested in having my jewelry photographed! Woohoo! I suck at taking pictures so YES!!! YES!!! YES!!!  Pretty excited!

My big focuses for this next week are:

1. Making jewelry (and continuing to photograph some of my own stuff)
2. Getting back to Esty
3. Finding all of my tax documents (this falls in the stockpile cash area!)