Time to take stock and admit to myself that I am in debt again. I haven't been denying it, just pushing it to the back of my head really. There are a couple of reasons but mostly just being careless and spending whatever I felt like over the past month or two, along with one or two bigger ticket items. €320 for an injection into my hip? Yay. Anyway, time to get back of track. I bought a budget calendar from PositiveReduceMyDebt (who I've been following on instagram for a couple of months now) and have filled out some goals for January.
- 15 no-spend days
- Stick to €25/week for food (given I ended up spending just over €90 already, this will be very tight)
- No-spend year - exceptions for January: step ladder and watercolours
I have taking some money out of savings to cover some of the bills and will work on getting the overdraft back down to zero over the year while building my savings back up. I do technically have enough in my investment account to cover all of it but I want to leave that where it is if possible. Head down and onwards. And the same applies to food and eating and meal planning. I let things go completely to pot in December and while I enjoyed it, I also badly need to get that under control again.
So, over the Christmas break, I made a meal plan for January, wrote a shopping list and on Sunday I cooked. My aim is to mostly only have to cook every second week or perhaps twice a month. I think time will tell on that one. On Sunday I made a big pot of vegetable soup, lemon chicken with veg and potatoes, and a chicken and spinach curry.
My meal plan is not one planning exactly what to have each day but rather a rough outline and then I can choose what I want to have on each day.
 |
| Yikes! |
- Butternut squash and ricotta frittata (6 servings)
- Chicken and spinach curry (4 servings)
- Oriental lentil stew (4 big servings - new recipe, depending on what it's actually like, this may make more servings than 4, I think)
- Cauliflower and broccoli gratin (4 servings)
- Lemon chicken with potatoes and veg (6 servings)
- Honey chilli pork (4 servings) - except they had no pork in the butchers so I took the suggested veal instead. Without checking the price first. Veal is expensive. How carelessness leads to yet another drop on the debt puddle!
So that's 28 dinners. For lunches, I planned for potato and leek soup, spicy lentil and carrot soup, pumpkin soup, and vegetable soup. Since I didn't even use half of the cabbage I got in the vegetable soup I made at the weekend and still ended up with 10 servings, I don't think I'll need to make all of the rest of those this month. I am also having a week or two of eating some of the meal replacement pouches that I should have, but didn't, use in December. Essentially starting over with a couple of weeks of the transition phase that was supposed to end just before Christmas. That will actually take care of some lunches, too.
The only word I could come up with for a word for the coming year was support. It made me kind of uncomfortable though, so I tried to think of something else. Before realising that I was feeling mostly uncomfortable with the idea of needing or asking for support. Probably a good indication that it really is the right word for me this year. Support it is.
And then on Saturday I read something in a tweet that I am also adopting as a kind of a motto for a while. If the right words come along at the right time for me, I'll grab on to them: Discipline always trumps motivation.
Don't wait until you're motivated to do something. Don't wait until you feel ready to start. It may never come. Discipline always trumps motivation.
— Cécile Chemin-Gordon (@MuayCe) December 29, 2021
Decide the kind of life you want to lead and say no to everything that isn't that.
#2022
No comments:
Post a Comment