What Has Been Done After 1 Month of Great Resolutions?

 

Last week, I read an article about New Year resolutions at DivHut. He provides pretty solid advice to keep your resolutions alive for more than more than two weeks. This is a major problem; we all want to improve our situation. It could be losing weight, finding love, saving money, paying down debts, buying a house, etc. We wake up after two weeks of partying telling ourselves: this year will be different, Ill make a resolution. And two weeks later we are stuck in our routine, tired and finding all kinds of excuses to forget our resolutions and get back to our regular (not to use a harsher word) life. This year again, I made some important resolutions… did I quit? Not yet! Here’s what has been done since January 1st!

 

Weight Loss

Yeah… that’s the classic; I wanted to lose weight! What a surprise, huh? But this time, I’m on the right path to keep it up. My wife and I have modified our schedules along to make sure we each have time to workout. During this month, I have successfully trained four times per week, running 16km per week and lifted weights several times . I’m now in better shape and…. Lost 10 pounds (from 198 to 188!).

 

Dividend Stocks Rock Growth

My investing membership site, Dividend Stocks Rock, is at the center of my early retirement plan. If I want to travel across America without money worries, I need a solid source of income. This has to come from my websites. This is why I not only changed my schedule to workout but also to work two nights on my websites. When I did my MBA full time, I used to work nights to advance my projects. It was about the only time I was alone and it was easy to concentrate. I tried this recipe once again and it works! I’m now working twice a week from 8/9pm to 12am in order to improve my sites and DSR. In January only, we added 15 new members. At this pace, I will grow my membership base by almost 200 members in a single year. Therefore, I should be over 500 members before I leave in 2016!

Along with working on DSR, I’m also working on this blog and other websites. As you can see, I’m writing more posts and sending more newsletters since the beginning of the year. I can see a big difference in traffic (and comments!) already. I hope this will continue to grow as I truly enjoy writing on this blog!

 

Retiring in 2016

This goal includes several resolutions at once! With our new schedule, we are able to allocate time to work on our house in order to put it up for sale in May of this year. We need to paint a few rooms and make a few quick fixes around the house (you know those small repairs you avoid for months? I’m in the middle of this now!). In January, we painted our bedroom and we are now ready to move to the bathroom.

We also made important changes in our food budget… or wine budget I must say. We now enjoy only one bottle per weekend, meaning we have one “big” supper and the rest of our meals are healthy and smaller. It’s enough to keep me happy (food & wine is one of the sources of my happiness in life) and it helps save more money. As I mentioned earlier this month, we are now consumer debt free leaving on the liabilities box my mortgage, my RV and car loan. They all will be cleared once we sell the house. I just hope we sell it this summer so we can start living in our RV right away and pile up some cash before leaving!

I’m pretty confident I will succeed in keeping my resolutions alive. The main difference this year compared to previous years is that I’ve made my schedule with my wife. We are set on the same schedule with similar goals. We can encourage each other and don’t want to let each other down either.

 

Have You Made Any Resolutions?

How are you holding up in this beginning of the year, were you able to keep all of your resolutions?

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