New Year's Resolutions: 1 Month Later

Here's how I'm doing so far, in descending order of success:

Contribute $20 each month to a worthy, off-beat charity (See, moustache, Baraka). On track. See below.

• January: Hire Heros USA - Not-for-profit providing career placement assistance to wounded vets.
  

Get Master's Degree. Doing fine. Three classes into my final course. On track to finish in May.

Pay off all credit cards and truck. Doing very well. Thanks to tax returns, bonuses (and Grandma), 80% of my credit card debt is payed off (despite buying a beautiful 52" Samsung LCD). I should ice this one by the end of March.

Lose 30 pounds. Going OK. Down 7.5 lbs after a shockingly bad January 1 weigh in.

Live on a 60-10-10-10-10 budget. Not there yet. Right now I'm around 75-0-3-16-6. Once I get rid of credit card and truck payments and refinance the condo I should be home. I'm thinking April or so.

Get new, awesome, job. Not going so well. I got a nice raise, making my current job somewhat more awesome. Plenty of work to do here.

Break into the top 10 Google results for "Zach Fletcher", "Zachary Fletcher", or "Big Ern". No luck yet. I was on the front page for "Big Ern" during football season, but have fallen off.

Write the computer code for the project I've been mulling for the last few years. Have done zilch. This may be replaced with another project I'm working on with my fellow villagers.

Create (and use) at least 2 of Digg, Technorati, etc.
Done zilch. Need to get off my ass. This one should be easy.

Become more active. Be able to complete 1 full week (7 days in a row) of CrossFit workouts. Again, very little done. Will (re-)join a gym in February. I may even go to it and work out.

Crush Elroy, ACom, and Electronic Vagrant in Villager page views. Not going well at all. Elroy's Don & Mike post is an unstoppable juggernaut. I refuse to link to it. Need to get on the ball here.

Remodel bathrooms. Haven't done anything yet. Once the fiscal projects are done, I can get into this.

Acquire at least 1 useful skill. Think carpentry or .NET design. Done nada. The year is young.

Past posts:
January

2008 Resolutions

Happy 2008 dedicated readers! I hope you both got everything you wanted for Christmas, and are striding into '08 happy, healthy, and inexplicably curious about our mundane doings.


As this blog is mainly about self-improvement, vanity, and the public airing of our private business, my resolutions for the New Year:

• Lose 30 pounds.
  
• Get new, awesome, job.
  
• Break into the top 10 Google results for "Zach Fletcher", "Zachary Fletcher", or "Big Ern"
• Get Master's Degree.
  
• Pay off all credit cards and truck.
• Live on a 60-10-10-10-10 budget.
  
• Write the computer code for the project I've been mulling for the last few years.
  
• Create (and use) at least 2 of Digg, Technorati, etc.
• Become more active. Be able to complete 1 full week (7 days in a row) of CrossFit workouts.
• Contribute $20 each month to a worthy, off-beat charity. (See, moustache, Baraka)
• Crush Elroy, ACom, and Electronic Vagrant in Villager page views.
• Remodel bathrooms.
• Acquire at least 1 useful skill. Think carpentry or .NET design.
  

I will be setting targets/measures of success for each resolution later this week. I will post updates on/about the first of each month. If other, not-so-new resolutions occur to me, I may add them.

Elroy, ACOM, EV, what will you be doing better this year?

*Fixed date to un-bury post.

$500 for Me, $25 for (Each of) Thou

Handsome devil that I am, it is difficult to understand why my list of acquaintances is limited to family and ex-frat guys. Neither group is renowned for fiscal or technical savvy. Thus, my referral bonuses for ING Direct Savings and ING Electric Orange checking remain (mostly) unclaimed.

Whether you stumbled upon Villager in pursuit of Japanese Pee or enlightened social commentary, you owe it to yourself to open one one or both flavors of account. With an invite from the gate keeper (me), you get a $25 bonus for opening an account with $250. If you don't have $250, I suggest borrowing it from your friendly neighborhood payday loan store, or betting against any or all of Big Ern's Locks.

If you want a referral (did I mention you get $25?) post your e-mail in the comments, and let me know if you want to open savings, checking or both. Alternatively, shoot your request to villagergmail dot zem at gishpuppy dot com. Note: all I get is you e-mail address. ING doesn't even tell me who signed up, all I know is that someone did.

Sign-up today, the number of referrals is limited:
Remaining savings referrals: 15
Remaining checking referrals: 25

And the Horrible Pie Chart Truth Will Set You Free

Alternate title: Save Money, Lose Weight, Play More Video Games

After playing with Mint for a few weeks, and fixing some of the (few) mis-labeled transactions, 2 things became abundantly clear:

1. Owning and improving a home in the DC area is expensive as balls.


2. I am spending enough money on fast food and coffee to lease a Kia.

The home improvement isn't that troubling, assuming anyone ever buys or sells a house again. Ever.

But the fast food spending is killing me (quite literally) in several ways. First, there are many better ways to utilize $310/month than Panda Express and Starbucks. Second (and I haven't done the legwork on this) I suspect there are healthier dining options extant.

Enter the magic of the internets. Starting Columbus day (no time to grocery shop before then) I will harness the self-improvement (and waist-line reducing) power of Joe's Goals, ING Direct, and self-loathing to banish fastfood and Starbucks from my (weekday) life. This should help me save money (for to pay off credit cards and buy a 40GB Playstation 3) and bring sexy back.

I typically spend ~$5 on breakfast/coffee and $10 on fastfood lunch and dinner. My thinking is that I can replace $125/week of fastfood with ~$50 of groceries, saving $75/week. Tracking my (hopefully) good behavior on Joe's Goals, I plan on dumping the first $35/saved each week into a no-fun ING account that will go towards credit cards. The other (possible) $40 will go to fun.

I'll check back in a month and let you know how it's going. If you don't hear from me, I'm probably at Pentagon City mall gorging myself on Kung Pao and Orange Chicken.