If you’re wondering how to get your life organized in the New Year, keep reading! Are you like me and swear that THIS will be the year that you get everything in your life organized for the New Year? Finances, meal planning, and decluttering are all areas I struggle with each year. I have the best intentions and always start off with a bang, but somehow it all seems to fizzle out by March. I have vowed to stay focused this year. Here are a few tools I’ll be using to keep it all together.
Finances and Budgeting
I can’t get down with budgeting software and spreadsheets that break everything down into millions of categories. I simply make a list of my bills and when they are due and sit down a week in advance to plan properly. This free printable budget tracker from the Savvy Couple is easy to fill in and help me see where our money is going each month.
However, I do love seeing our debts shrinking! One fun and easy way to do this is by using Debt Free Charts. Most of these are free. Some cost a dollar or two. I downloaded the ones that were relevant to our family’s needs and placed them in a binder. I’m a visual person, so seeing our debt shrink and charting it on paper in such a cool way is motivating for me. This is a great way to get your financial life organized and see your debt shrinking away!
As for my eBay business, I use GoDaddy Bookkeeping to help me stay organized with expenses and profits. It’s super easy to navigate and it’s also affordable as well.
For blogging, I use a free blog income tracker that calculates everything I need. Very simple to use and plug in the numbers. It’s seriously the best one I have found online that does everything I need it to do without being complicated.
Meal Planning
Meal planning is an area I struggle with and it’s simply because I’m lazy. However, due to rising costs at the grocery store, I have decided that this is an area that definitely needs to improve. Not only will it save me time, but it will also save me money. I love this free meal planner printable from The Happier Homemaker. It’s just perfect for planning our weekly meals.
Home Organization
Trying to find something to wear each day to work used to be a huge pain for me because my closet was an unorganized mess! However, I did a good clean out and organized my closet Marie Kondo-style and wrote about it here. I’m happy to report that it’s still working out for me and getting ready for work now is a breeze! I also recently went through my bathroom cabinets and makeup drawers and cleaned out as well.
Organizing and decluttering your home can seem like a huge task that’s impossible, but it’s really not. If you have a few minutes in your day, just go from room to room and weed a few things out that you no longer use. Donate what you can and throw away what you can’t. A few sweeps through each room will make a huge difference in helping you get your life organized for the New Year. Less clutter just feels and looks better.
Everything Else
I’m working on decluttering my bookmarks on my computer and phone. I tend to save things and forget why. I’m also going through my inboxes and clearing out emails I no longer need. A bad habit of mine is that I tend to save emails until I am ready to take action and sometimes that can be a few days if it deals with a sale at an online store or something not very important that can wait.
I purchased this new address book to start the new year fresh because so many of our friends and family have moved in the last year. I was shocked when it came time to do Christmas cards at how many new addresses I needed to make note of. What I absolutely love about this address book is that there is a section in the back for all of your website logins and passwords. I definitely needed to get that organized as well, and now it’s all in one place.
I’ll also be working on more personal correspondence (handwritten cards, birthday cards, and thank-you notes) this year. I feel like that’s becoming a lost art and I love writing. I have big plans for gradually becoming more organized for the holidays well in advance this next year as well. Scrambling around shopping and cooking at the last minute this year was no fun! I will have a better system in place for that and I’ll also share more about that in another post.
What are some areas you struggle with when it comes to getting your life organized? What do you use to help yourself stay on top of things?
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