2015 Goals and How I plan to Achieve Them

For New Years Eve Reed and I headed down to Charleston, SC to spend a night with good friends enjoying the coast and lots of bubbly drinks. On our 3 hour drive down we discussed goals we both had for 2015. We are both pretty stoked about our list and think with a bit of elbow grease we should be able to achieve all of them by 2016!! The list is kinda long but I thought I would share a handful with you because I'm hoping to keep you updated through out the year :)

First I'll do a couple of my Business goals.
As an owner of a small business I have a long list of things to learn and improve on but the biggest three for me are advertising, taxes and new products.

Hopefully in the near future I will do a quick write up on some of the easy, cost efficient and most effective ways I've found to advertise. It may be a bit redundant from other sources but I'm hoping to put it in a perspective that other people who have no clue what they are doing with a business can find a little guidance from my years of running blindly :)

TAXESSS. Basically they suck so no surprise they are something I need to get better at. I've had lots of mishaps that I've had to fix and am learning quickly on how I can make this dreaded topic a bit easier on myself. So I'm going to attempt to make taxes cute and somewhat approachable in 2015.

New Products! This is the fun one. Usually I produce a couple new products every month. But this year I want to push myself to produce 2 new "lines" of products and 5 new large scale furniture designs. Thats a lot. BUT I think the more I push myself the larger audience I can reach and with that the more stream line I can make my shop! (I'm working on starting 1 of the lines this January and having 3 of the furniture pieces completed by April!!)

Now, for the family portion of my 2015 goals. These are the ones I am most stoked about.
I may be like super weird, or getting old, but I'm  a big time budgeter. And I love it.
Like seriously there is something about figuring out how to be smart with our money that just makes me giddy in side! (Weird because I hate math and usually anything to do with numbers...) Most of the goals I will be sharing with y'all are for our 2015 budget. We have some big dreams we are wanting to move forward with and the first big step with all of those is figuring out the MONEY side of things.

First things first. Revamp our 2015 budget. I shared our Envelope system with you almost a year ago and we are still rolling with it and LOVE IT. So be on a look out for a revised version and an update on how we feel about it :)

After we tackle that baby we will be adding the 52 Week Money Challenge to our 2015 budget. We are hoping it can be a fun and rewarding thing to keep track of.

The biggest most exciting goal for 2015 is that we are going to PAY OFF THE TRUCKKKKK. Yes, its going to be the hardest part but we are hoping with revamping our budget, and with the 52 Week Challenge that we can achieve finishing off 3 years of payments in just 1 year.

I know this is "supposed" to be an art/craft/DIY blog so you may not understand why I'm sharing so much about dumb numbers (I'm not sure I do either). But I think the biggest lesson I learned in 2014 was that even though I am a creative person, I cant be creative and complete the projects I want with out proper planning on all sides. That means I need to budget my time and money in order to achieve the projects I've so excitedly planned in my sketch book :) I hope you will join me and maybe find some help from a few of these new little "series" that I will be sharing!!

Party Pail Party Supplies - Beautiful Paper Decorations

Have y'all heard of the party supplier Party Pail? I hadn't heard about them until just a month ago when they contacted me and asked if I would be interested in trying out some of their products for my next party. Once I started clicking through their site I was amazed with all they offer! I created a long list of things that I wasn't expecting to receive but thought I should at least try :) 

Party Pail offers everything from party supplies (paper plates, cups, flatware, ect.) to any and every decor item for loads of different party themes! I knew for our 4th of July BBQ we needed something to give it a little oomph. I already had the paper products I found in Targets Dollar Spot so I was just looking for decorations. 

Party Pail hooked me up with 16" white and red paper fans that were super sturdy and took up a great amount of space above our food table. I also got LOADS of balloons, and red and white tissue balls. These types of party decorations make for a quick and easy way to make your party FEEL like a party! I was super pleased that I could set up everything in under an hour and it looks like we spent lots of time and money. Trust me, I loved the products, and already have a plan to work with them again for some of my seasonal decorations!  

I added a couple little things from the house, like this amazing blue table cloth we got as a wedding gift. We also picked up some festive flowers to add to the simple table scape. Plus I got a super awesome vintage Spiffy Insulated Jug with fun red white and blue stripes that held a yummy lemonade spritzer!

Plus, a new pup is always a great addition to any get together ;)

We knew it was gonna be a little roasty toasty out side but wanted to have an all day blow out Independence day celebration. So besides the festive decorations from Party Pail we decided to spice things up with a BRING YOUR OWN POOL PARTY! Yep you right, it was awesome. A couple people picked up some cheap baby pools and brought their beach chairs. For the rest of the day we soaked up the sun and cooled off with our feet in the pools. 

And you can't have a festive party with out wearing the right outfit! Reed and I went all out with American themed apparel. We had a blast with our party and I can't tell you how awesome it was wot work with Party Pail so go check them out and see what you can get for your next get together! 

The Envelope Budget (Month 1)

Have you ever heard of The Envelope System? I'm sure most of you have so this post may be a bit boring or redundant; however, for those of you who haven't heard of it I'm going to explain it the best my little brain can and tell y'all about our first month using it!

Basically it is a system of budgeting that has been around for ages, ya know like your grandma and maybe your great grandma used it kinda thing. But in the age of swiping cards we kinda lost this easy budget idea and thanks to Dave Ramsey he brought it back with vengeance :) You can read how Dave Ramsey explains it HERE.

This is how I convinced Reed to get on board. We had our budget all figured out and I was pretty proud of it. But having it all figured up on an excel spread sheet did nothing to how we felt like spending when out and about.  So I took our budget we figured up when Reed got his first pay check and transferred everything to cash. Yep, we went and basically cashed Reeds entire pay check for the month of February! Of course there where things that we automatically paid online like our tithe, bills, and savings. So I paid all that jazz first. But then we split up the rest in to envelopes that were specific to different categories.

We kept it simple and just did gas, groceries, eating out, and projects. (Yes, we take on so many projects that we have an entire envelope dedicated to it, and really we split that in two so we each had our own project budget...)  At first it was hard, because I actually had to look at what I was putting in the grocery cart instead of just getting everything I wanted for the next two weeks. Reed and I didn't realize how much we had been spending on drinks. Between apple juice, orange juice, mountain dew, tea, beer, and wine it felt like half of our budget was gone! Needless to say we learned to cut back a bit on our drink variety... Same for gas money. Reed loves his truck and also loves to get little treats when he fills up on gas. But thanks to our handy dandy gas envelope Reed cut back on getting his treats because that was taking away from him being able to drive his truck the way he wanted to.

It all may seem pretty trivial, but I think it was the small things that were killing us. We never had a super hard time with our budget, ya know thank the Lord we never had to go with out anything of importance! But we worried at the end of almost every month that we wouldn't have the gas money we needed or enough money in the bank to get groceries. Getting paid once a month has been hard to get used to! But thanks to this new system we hardly worried at all this month! Knowing that the envelope was there and it had the money in it for the entire month meant we really had to stop and think about what we were doing. I've cut back significantly on my Lowes trips, we haven't gone out of town nearly as much as we were. And we actually have taken ourselves out to dinner with out feeling bad about it!

Yes it sucks some times, like I burned through my project budget in a week. But, that just meant I had to use the materials on hand and be even more creative than normal. It has been a great challenge for us. We are revising our envelopes a little bit this coming month. We just learned that we didn't budget enough for gas, and over budgeted on other things.

 Man, Reed and I both learned a lot about our spending habits. And I've LOOOVVVVEEEDDD not swiping my card. I don't know what it is but using cash and knowing exactly how much money I have is pretty great, no sneaky spending, no worrying if I buy this will it make it so I can't buy groceries later. I would totally recommend this system to anyone. Even if you just do it for one month to see where you are really spending your money.

Have y'all ever tried out this system? Or do you have another system that works well for your family??