Timetobeme's Blog

I picked a rather dramatic title but it is just how I am feeling this new year.

I am 62 years old , heading to 63 in June. I have battled the same issues, year after year, and frankly I am tired of waking up every January first , determined to change things, yet again.

So, this year I set 3 big goals. NOT resolutions, goals.

Goal number 1, I will lose weight this year. I joined weight watchers and started on January 1. As of today, I am 27 days in and doing great. I have lost 12 pounds and for the first time in my entire life, feel I have found a plan that is sustainable for life and actually fun. Yes fun. My goal for the year is to lose at least 50 (or more) of the over 100 I need to lose. I need to lose , well at starting weight I wanted to lose 120 pounds. I have lost 12 so have 108 left until goal.

I resisted this plan for years. I had an actual visceral reaction to it, hating the idea of a plan I honestly did not know much about. Pretty ignorant to be sure.

What turned me around, despite our oldest daughter telling me how great it was for years, was seeing a woman on YouTube I have followed for over six years start the plan and love it. I got to see her actually living it. That made all the difference. You can tell me all about something, but to see someone actually living the plan. Talking about how it works and the food, made all the difference.

So, check goal number one , I am losing weight and enjoying the plan so much. My daughter is back on, my husband joined this past week and a dear friend and cousin in law, also started this past week. I could not be more thrilled !! I plan to be on this plan for life.

So, on to goal number two, get our finances straightened out. Once and for all. We have not got a lack of money in our lives we have a lack of savings and not watching our spending. We do not buy expensive things. We do not take trips. We do not gamble, drink or do drugs. I hope that would be a given, but just saying it anyway to make sure you know that , lol !!

We spend on food. Kind of ties into goal number one a bit huh ?

Groceries, eating out, we spend WAY too much. So, we are working on fine tuning our budget right now. I wanted to spend a stupid low amount on food and then ending up spending about twice that as we were starting a new diet and had certain things we wanted to stock up on. Now we are there, and plan to cut the food spending down as low as we can. We want to use up what we have. The good thing is, with WW we can eat anything if we budget our points correctly. We did make sure to have the WW friendly foods, but we are now going to combine that with using some of the items that are a bit more point costly to slowly use what we have in the fridge and freezers. So, February will be a fun month, we are going to make it a game to see how little we can spend. We will buy the fresh produce, and some eggs and dairy items we use daily, all fat free of course. However, we are going to spend as little as we can from now until March and see how we do.

We want to get a fully funded six month emergency fun saved up. We want to figure out a savings plan for retirement as well as major projects we have to do for our house. Finish our kitchen remodel that got put on the back burned when my husband had two back surgeries, a hernia surgery and a meniscus surgery between July of 2019 and last March. We have to get a new roof put on our home as well as our homeowner insurance is way too high but we cannot move to a cheaper place until we replace the 41 year old roof, which needs to be done for insulation sake. It has never leaked. So, that process will get started tomorrow.

So, anyway, the budget is a project still a bit under construction but I will be getting it fine tuned in the next couple of days and I am so excited to see how February goes and then see if we can stretch it through March into April just buying the few categories we have to buy fresh and then starting in March, replacing what we use in addition to that. IE, use a pack of t paper, replace it Will do a bit of that in March on just a few important things, but most stuff we will use our extras and spend as little as possible .

Now, that said. I do plan to set aside a bit of cash for the month. There are just those times you could use a cheap meal to go when you have a stressful day. That is not a problem if it is budgeted in and limited. I want to keep easy stuff at home and only use that money I set aside if we really feel we need it. It would be fun get through the month without touching it and I will try !!! However, I do not want to set us up for failure so I want to allow that money to be set aside and if we use it, we use it. No judging ourselves if we do.

Last goal for the year is purging. We have so much stuff. WAY too much stuff that we need to sell. We would like to get our belongings down to less than half. After 21 years on this property we have collected a lot of stuff. We have many boxes of stuff to resell, bought for selling online, or for the occasional antique booths we have had over the years. So, lots of wonderful stuff for yard sales and our kids have been adding to it, so we can have a few great sales for all of us. Not sure when, but hopefully soon.

The other thing about selling stuff is it will help with the financial stuff for sure. That extra will go in the bank towards our savings.

My husband will be 62 this year. He wants to retire in about five years so that is a big goal for us, to get some extra savings put away. We have a very small 401 k and a small pension so we want to get ourselves in the best place we can financially. We are not setting a retirement date until we have all our ducks in a row, and we feel safe and prepared. He has a good job and is as secure as one can be these days. If he had to work until 70, he could for sure. So, we will take it a year at a time and see what we can accomplish over the next five years .

So, I plan to document what we are doing here on this blog as well as my YouTube channel , Time to be Frugal. Which may get changed to Time to be Frugal and healthy or something along those lines.

I will be posting some posts here about each one of these goals. I want to keep track of our progress for me, and if anyone else enjoys it and gets some inspiration of encouragement from what I post, that is even better. I will do more of an indepth about WW . In fact today, as I was writing the mail came. In the mail was a key chain with a charm and it says 5 pounds on the back, and is blue on front, it says that I hit my five pound milestone. It says We’re celebrating you and your amazing achievement!!! Your WW family.

How cool is that. We also found out after we both joined that his work had a deal with them. So, instead of paying $10 plus tax for 10 months and then 23 plus tax after that, we pay just $3.69 a month. Under four bucks each !!At least until he retires !! So, that gives us a huge amount of time to get all our weight off. I am hoping we can earn the life time by then and not have to pay anymore after we lose all the weight. And because we signed up through work we each got a free WW digital bathroom scale We gave one to our daughter and kept one. So, that is pretty awesome !!!

So, that is where we are at. I am kind of shocked that January is almost over. Just a handful of days left. Four to be exact. I will do a wrap up the first of each month about the month before regarding were we are on our goals. My husband is pretty much working on the same goals as I am am, so it helps to be doing them all together.

It feels good to have goals that are doable and we are going to accomplish what we set out to do.