3 Year Plan

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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 Fun Family Tips 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 Fun Family Tips: 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 Fun Family Tips so much that I’ve decided to redesign Holiday Craft Projects as well.  Stay tuned!

Some more recent news? Visits to Fun Family Tips 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!)

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!