Ok…it’s that annual time for New Year’s resolutions. They’re the promises that we always make that almost never come true, yet we do it over and over and over again. But this time I’m disciplined and sincere and ready to jump on the bandwagon and start to make it happen. So what do I plan to do better or differently this year? Here’s my set of goals:

• To blog more often! Yes, my history over the past year has been very bad. I got too busy and too tied up with my work. Plus, as a consultant it’s hard because some of the cool things that I do at work I can’t necessarily blog about because of non-disclosure agreements and other confidentiality rules. But I promise over the next 12 months to do a more active job of blogging about what I am learning about and sharing the wealth of random knowledge that seems to exist in my head.
• To keep better control over my budget. I’ve already started this and am doing well so far. My wife Mea and I saw the change in the economy early last year and set up a budget. We were shocked when we first set up our budget and watched it at how much we were spending. More money was going out than coming in. It was a hard turn-around, but we managed to take control and reverse the process. The end-result was that we broke the cycle of madness and we had a great holiday season from Thanksgiving on. There was enough money for the Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Year’s party meals. We had enough money to get ourselves lots of presents. We even did a weekend trip to Disneyland and stayed at the Disneyland hotel, plus had plenty of spending money (too much, in fact). It’s hard to keep to a budget at Disneyland when everybody wants every little thing that they see. So the first thing that I’ve done in 2009 is break out Excel and put together our budget again for the first six months of the year, and as long as we can keep to it, we’ll be looking very good and will start rebuilding those savings accounts.
• Pay down debt. After a long, long, long time, my student loan is on its last legs. Only a couple more months of it, but really it’s at the point that I can pay it down and get rid of it. That will free up more money for other budgetary needs. Plus paying down other credit debt that we’ve accumulated over the past year. My house runs mostly on cash. We use credit for very little, but we do have some debt that is manageable. So either it will all drop off this year, or by the end of the year will be very small and even more manageable by the time that we get there.
• Be better organized. I keep saying this one, we’ll see how it comes out.
• More running and gym time. I keep going through a cycle of going for a few weeks, taking a few weeks off because I get busy, then restarting. I need to keep up a constant routine and push it up a few notches.

These are my initial set of goals. I’m sure that more will be coming soon.