A New Year

December has been a time of reflection and re-evaluation for me. The children were sick with colds the first part of the month so there was a lot of down time and time to think while I snuggled children and made soups. We cancelled plans and just stayed home and my four walls gave repose and my mind wandered back over the last few years.

The last couple of years there has been tremendous change in our lives and it has felt like life has been happening to us rather than us intentionally happening to life. I do not think I am alone in these feelings. I have felt like I'm treading water, just trying to keep everything together and moving in some semblance of direction.

March 2020 saw the pandemic hit and us stranded overseas. When we were finally able to come home, it felt like some dystopian universe. Three weeks after arriving back in the States, we moved across country from West Virginia to Montana. There was the job change and the emotional changes of moving both for us and for the children. We moved far away from family and friends and the life we had created for the last 3 years. It was the end of the dreams we had for that place. We were starting all over again and had little idea of what the future would look like. We settled in a temporary apartment for 2 months that was fully furnished so we didn't have many of our own familiar things around us and we had moved with so little that we had to start over anyway. Two months later we moved to a beautiful farm house that captured our hearts. We had plans to buy the house towards the end of 2020 and would have land to raise animals and do some things we always wanted. I was really looking forward to owning again and feeling settled in a place that was ours. A place we could dream and grow. A place to have roots. My husband was planning on going into business for himself. I was anxious to feel at home again and have some more established routines. 2020 had been a rough year on the heart and I was longing for stability and normality.

Right before closing on our house, life drastically changed for us again. Most of you know the story of our move in the spring of 2021. If not, you can go back through my blog posts where I wrote about it. That was another move (a very stressful one, I might add) and job change. We saw the incredible provision of the Lord through all of it and we have been so blessed with a job and home to rent. However, we never saw this coming and it really threw us for a loop. The change in direction and the loss of a friendship that had been very dear to us for many years took awhile to process and come to terms with. Less than a year after making a cross country move and starting over, we started over again. To say that my heart felt a bit battered was an understatement. We had been living in the country for the last 3 years and now we were back in town, from owning to renting again, from debt free to having debt again. It felt like all of our hard work had been washed away and we were starting from scratch.

2021 has been nothing like we expected - let's be honest, 2020 wasn't either! It has been a good year and I am very thankful for it but as I look ahead and look behind, I am wanting more direction and intentionality in my life than the last 2 years have had. With all the changes we've had, I feel like I have been mostly holding on for dear life and bracing myself for the next wave to hit. It has felt like very little has been stable and for someone who thrives on stability, the last two years have been hard for my heart.

With all these reflections and thoughts at the beginning of this month and the realization that I needed to take back some semblance of control and establish some direction for my own sense of well being, I remembered that it was the last month of the year and we were about to start a new year. What a great time to start! I am not one on New Year's resolutions unless they are made into a plan and implemented, but I do enjoy fresh starts and I like to see a whole year in review. Tracking things annually gives a great overall picture and it's fun to see progress over a year's time. I love fresh starts and new beginnings and so I love the new year and the excitement that it brings. This year even more than most, I am ready to see a clean slate and fresh start!

My first order of business is refocusing my priorities and vision and creating a game plan. I know it is not sustainable to tackle every part of life at once so I picked my top priorities. My biggest priority is our finances. When we moved in May of 2020 across country, we opened an online bank account for our in-between bank until we could open a local bank account again. When we arrived in MT, the local bank lobbies were still closed and were by appointment only. My husband's work schedule was quite hectic and with only one vehicle, we just never got it done. Nine months later saw us relocating a couple hours away to where we currently live. I was glad that closing a bank account was one less thing we had to worry about since we had kept our online bank account.

Ever since we started budgeting in 2013, we always used a cash envelope system and spent cash. It served us tremendously well. We paid off our debt, traveled, bought our first home, and thrived. It allowed us to take jobs with less pay and move to places we wouldn't otherwise have been able to afford. We lived as a family of 5 on $18,500 for 14 months between 2017-2018 while we ran our own business. I largely attribute our ability to navigate the ups and downs of finances to pen and paper and cash envelopes. This has been something that I was not happy to give up in 2020 when we went with an online bank account but it was supposed to be a temporary thing that has stretched into almost 2 years. However, most of our ordering ended up being online over the last couple of years - something that we did very little of before, whether that was ordering groceries from Azure and Sam's Club, or household and clothing items. Over 2020 we just generally tried to spend as little as possible and most of our money that went out was for a few bills and food. I still kept a paper budget and much of the same method as previously, just without the physical cash. 2021 has been a much more expensive year for us with a lot of things needing to be replaced, moving expenses, and having to buy a vehicle when our other one gave out and couldn't be repaired.

We used YNAB over the summer as I had heard amazing things about it and had always been curious to try it. I think it is probably one of the best budgeting apps/software I have seen. If that is your thing, I highly recommend it. But I learned (again) that I really don't like doing my budget online and really like pen and paper. It's just how my brain works and the extra effort it takes actually helps me stay on track. My husband loved YNAB and the app. So we did that for about 6 months but after I gave up my smartphone it became harder to use since I had to use the desktop. I didn't find the desktop version to be as easy to navigate as the app was (just personal opinion.) They recently increased their price and I think we have decided not to renew. Maybe in the future we will look into it again, it really is a great software, but for now I'm returning to my trusty pen and paper that has always worked so great.

Now that we are settled in and things have mostly calmed down and become more routine for us and I feel like I have more bandwidth to plan and tackle things, I am ready for a reset. We opened a local bank account and got out cash for our envelopes for the first time since April 2020. I am doing a no spend month in January (my first ever! I'm not a big spender) and also doing a pantry challenge to try to spend as little as possible on food this next month. I am so excited to jumpstart the year with some concrete goals and a solid plan in place. I have ambitious goals to pay off our truck (our only debt) as well this year. I cannot even tell you how excited I am to have physical cash and my old envelopes in use again!

I am excited to take the year by the horns so to speak and regain a sense of purpose and direction again! I'd love to hear if you have been feeling these same feelings and if you have any New Year's goals.