I'm Afraid To Do This, But Here Goes...

I'm going to start document my spending habits here too. The fact is, I have two major - actually, three areas of my life that I feel need the most work; my physical fitness, my financial fitness, and my psychological fitness. The psychological to me includes healing past hurts and wounds, moving forward into a more spiritually awake existence, and good old psychology. But NOT psychology that jsut spins and spins into blaming my family and upbringing for my current problems. That's not useful - believe me, I've been doing it for years. I'm talking positive psychology, which moves the person out of their anger and ruts and into their best self.

While we'll be covering all three, this one is primarily money focused. How can I focus one on money, when I'm also doing another one on spirituality? Well, I think that learning to manage my money is part of my spiritual growth.

Hold on there, pardner - don't go running away quite yet. The more I read about living the life you want, becoming your best self, they all seem to say that money is not the evil - the hurtfuls acts committed in an effort to obtain the most money possible are what hurts our own selves and society as a whole.

But when money is looked at as a possible platform for growth, to learn how to be disciplined and flowing - that to me is a great lesson to learn.

Here's a quick sum up: My money is a mess. I have gone to my family to help me out on occassion, but I can tell they (rightfully so) resented it. So I have a friend - my friend Mick - who "helps me out" sometimes. Some would call this a great friend. Others would call it an enabler. The truth is, if Mick didn't give me money, I do wonder if we would be friends or not.

My goal for 2010 is to simply learn to live within my income. That's it. I need to go back to crawling, and then start walking and then running, hopefully. Because right now, I can't even make it through one pay period without asking Mick for something. It could just be him paying for us to go to Chipotle, it could be as much as me saying, wow, I really fucked up ... could you spare a few hundred dollars? Yeah. It's tragic and awful and pathetic and true - I go through my money like an alcoholic goes through bottles of whiskey. I feel no control over my money. I plan to change that this year.

So, that's where we are starting, with next year's goal. Then we can look at credit card debt paydown and so on, but my baseline is to live within my paycheck every week. We'll grow from there.

Today's Painful Realization: I went Christmas shopping. Mick spotted me the money, as he determined that I should get my family gifts. I hated that I am that little girlish that I couldn't budget for that on my own. Next year, I will have planned it in. A lot of things are going to change this year. I plan to join Debtor's Anonymous next year. It's going to be a rocky road. I hope you join me on my ride