Thirty Before Thirty - Part 3

It's the final countdown... er, the final 9 items on my Thirty Before Thirty list.

GIVE

22.  Donate to Goodwill monthly

We have boxes upon boxes in our basement that need to be sorted.  I have a closet FULL of clothes and I only wear about a third of them.  Both of those things mean that I need to donate some of my stuff to Goodwill.  We've taken 2 trips in the past month and it feels really good to get rid of stuff.

23.  Trade babysitting with a friend for a monthly date night with the hubs

I should really approach a few friends about this idea.  My kids aren't hard.  In fact, Lenon visits his mother every other weekend so if we went to dinner or whatnot on a weekend that he was gone it would just be Ezra.  And Ez goes to bed between 7:30 and 8:00 each night.  I'm sure one of my friends would be game.

BUSINESS

24.  Have professional business photos taken

This shouldn't be hard.  My friend Stacy is a photographer.  My thing about it is actually getting in front of the camera.

25.  Learn about getting a business license for my Etsy shop

If I really want to make a go of selling products I make, I should really look into being licensed.  I have no idea what that entails, so I should probably do some research.

26.  Create 5 different items to sell on Etsy

I have TONS of ideas, but I need to work on execution.  And then I need to calculate wholesale vs. retail prices so I'm not making something that's putting me in the hole.

27.  Sell my first item

Sounds easy enough... not really something I have much control over.  But I do have control over stocking the Etsy shop.  So as soon as I complete #26 I can work on this one.

FINANCES

28.  Plan a budget and stick to it

I'm good a planning a budget.  Even down to creating formulas in Excel and having it calculate for me when I type in our income vs. bills.  It's just sticking to it that's the problem.  We really need to work on a savings account.  Right now our jobs are pretty secure, but we've seen hundreds of people get laid off from the company Frank and I both work for and that's scary.

29.  Pay off credit cards

We only have a couple and they have low limits which we did on purpose.  Being that we both work for a credit card company, we know the in's and out's of credit cards and don't want to dig ourselves a hole we can't get out of.  So it shouldn't be hard to pay them off, but it's definitely something I want to do within the coming months.

30.  Pay off car

This one might be tricky.  We have almost 2 years left on our loan, but I was calculating and if we added 25% to our monthly payments and then used a portion of our tax return next year, we could do it.

Well, those are my goals for the year.  I have big plans for them.  Hopefully they cooperate.  


And once I'm done, we'll be looking at this...

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