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!

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!

The bins are from the Dollar Tree – nothing fancy but just perfect for holding tons of crap! The labels are simple-for the spices, I wrote the name of EVERY spice that was in each bin in alphabetical order on a sticky notecard and placed it on the front; for the medicine, the labels are more generalized such as “Pain Relief” and “Cold and Sinus.”

I think this will make cooking so much more efficient AND I won’t ever lose my poor dogs medicine again!

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?

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.

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!)

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!

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.

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 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 FFT

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.

FFT 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!

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.  Using coupons matched to the sale I am able to pay anywhere for 1/3-1/2 off the retail price of my groceries…so that explains why I’m getting by so cheaply with groceries!

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!

So I’ve made the announcement that I’m going to quit my job (to you at least!)–but please don’t think that I’m just going to dilly-dally around all day after I do so. My plans are much more grandiose than that

Currently, I sell jewelry and handmade items on eBay, Amazon.com Marketplace and Fulfillment By Amazon, and Etsy (I use the term sell pretty loosely for the Etsy gig right now since I’ve only made 1 sale so far!), and run two additional blogs: FFT (I used to have the actual blog name/link here but had to remove it because folks at work started to find out that I have that site…which can easily be linked back to this site…which could potentially get me fired before the 3 years are up! and Holiday Craft Projects.  With an active 4-year old and all of my side projects, my days (and nights) are pretty packed right now–and probably will be for a long time!

So here’s my plan:  Make these side projects profitable enough to support myself and my son!

Obviously, a lot of my crafting, jewelry-making, and blogging is done in the early morning and late at night.  With minimal time to spare, I feel that being uber-organized in the next 3 years is going to be vital to my success.

Since this is still the early stages, I can be a bit more “high level” with my goals, but I’m going to go ahead and brainstorm on some of the goals that I need to achieve in the near future:

Done! Begin advertising on Holiday Craft Projects and this blog – I have advertising on FFT currently.  I advertise for Google Ads, Amazon.com, Alice.com, eBates, and several individual companies on FFT.  What I do not, and will not advertise for is companies that I do not personally trust and would not personally deal with.  I feel that is unethical and would not compromise myself or my readers in that manner.

Begin advertising through my RSS feeds for all of my blogs using GoogeAds for feeds – This *should* be turned on as of this blog entry for 3yearplan, but I honestly won’t know until I post this It is definitely not working for FFT though (What am I doing wrong?! Does it just take time to go live?! EEK!)

Get back to listing daily on Etsy – I took a bit of a break here.  This was actually the result of my frustration with the poor quality of my photos.  Jewelry is apparently incredibly difficult to photograph without proper lighting and no matter how amazing the piece looked in front of me, I couldn’t get past the horrible quality of the pictures.  I currently have at least 20 new pieces just waiting to be posted but I cannot get the photos to show the quality of the items! Which leads me to my next goal:

Done! Build a light box for photographing jewelry – According to everything that I have read, this is the key ingredient that I am missing in my pictures.  I’m looking at several plans right now and I’ll let you know what I come up with soon!

Obtain a business license – Yup.  It’s time.  I haven’t earned enough yet from my side projects to require that I do so, but clearly, I plan to.

Focus on Holiday Craft Projects more – I haven’t touched it in a while.  It’s a great domain name, I have great ideas for it; I’ve just been short on time lately.

Cut costs and stockpile money – Realizing that I am planning to cut off my family’s main source of income in 2013 and that I may need a cushion to live off of to get this thing going,  I need to cut my costs, stockpile cash, and get prepared.  Again, I have to make this leap responsibly.  This is something that I have already been agressively focusing on and I will discuss further in future posts.

Eliminate Debt - Again, this is something that I have aggressively focused on recently and I currently have only 2 debts besides my mortgage – my car payment and a 401K loan that I took out to cover the costs associated with my divorce and subsequent custody battle.  I will discuss my plan of action for this goal soon as well.

Organize and consolidate my office/craft rooms – Yes.  I said rooms.  Currently, 2 of the 4 bedrooms in my house are occupied with my office and art supplies.  In order to be more productive I need to get these rooms completely organized and efficient–and in the interest of seeming like a more gracious host, I need to convert one of these rooms into a guest room (with supply storage, of course!).

Done! Upgrade my existing blogs: FFT and Holiday Craft Projects are both on a very very old version of Wordpress that apparently has some vulerabilities and lacks the functionality of the newest version.  This blog is on the newest version and I have to tell you, the back end of it ROCKS compared to the old versions!

Aggressively train my replacement for my current job - I truly believe in the mission of the company that I currently work for–it’s just not my dream.  The company has been very very good to me and I absolutely will not leave them in a tough spot without someone to fill my shoes.  The position I hold is a role that I created and developed.  Thankfully, I have an excellent staff that will just need a bit of grooming and one of them will definitely be ready to take my spot when I leave.

That’s the plan.  I’ll let you know when I think of more