I have some big goals and I have some small goals. I write about my big goals on this site all of the time, but I think it would be good to list them here along with some smaller goals for the calendar year so I can look back next year and see how I did in 2008.

Big Goals for 2008:

• Pay off all Credit card debt — $18,504.78 as of January 1
• Get body fat percentage under 25% — 39% as of January 1

Small Goals for 2008:

• Increase our emergency fund to $5,000 — currently about $1,200
• Earn $20,000 (gross) from side businesses
• Start a Roth IRA with at least $1,000
• Buy life insurance
• Write a will

How to accomplish these goals

Pay off all credit card debt - If we look at 12 months, we need to average $1,542.06 of principal paid on our credit cards each month. That is just about $100 more than we have averaged since starting our debt reduction plan, however in our first two months of the plan we only paid about $1,000 total. Given our current rate, this should be easily achieved. My dream is to have it done by September.

Body fat percentage under 25% - My current number varies a bit with the scale I am using now. I think the real number is closer to 37%, but whatever the case it is way too high. 25% is on the upper end of the ‘normal’ range for a man, so that is my first goal.

You may wonder why I focus on pounds so much on this blog. I guess I’m not exactly sure myself except that I started out that way and it makes for an easy to track number. I chose body fat percentage for this goal rather than pounds because body fat is a more realistic indication of health and fitness. I can only achieve this by committing to regular exercise and making a complete overhaul of my diet. I need to do this if I want to live a long and healthy life, so there is no excuse for me to fail this year.

Increase our emergency fund to $5,000 - My first thought was to fund an IRA to $5,000, but given the weakness of a $1,000 emergency fund and the fact that I actually want to live without credit cards, this needs to be my top priority. If possible, I will fully fund an IRA as well. If we can pay off the credit cards by September, it will be easy to shift that money to the emergency fund. If not, we are going to need alternative income sources to make this happen.

Earn $20,000 gross from side businesses - I have half of that number expected already through a web maintenance contract in ‘08, although that is not a guaranteed contract so I need to be working on adding other projects anyway. My wife will make a little money doing standardised test grading a couple of times during the year and some occasional tutoring. Since she is a teacher she will have the summer off, but I’m not sure what sort of income opportunities she will be able to pursue then. I hope to make a little money from this blog some day, but until then I will be focused on growing my freelance web development business.

Start a Roth IRA with at least $1,000 - I really want to get started on this ASAP. I know I have neglected it for too long, but I am also in the difficult position of being buried by debt so I have to balance the timing of this. If we have a great year, I will fully fund at least one IRA in 2008.

Buy life insurance - long over due, should have been done ‘yesterday’. I need to set aside a few hundred bucks and get some quotes. Need to get on this ASAP.

Write a will - I don’t think we have to rush out and do this today, but it should definitely get done this year. We have no assets and no children so if both of us die things wouldn’t be too complicated (though I do admit that a will would make life easier on our loved ones who have to deal with the mess). It will get done this year! 

That’s it for the plan in 2008. I will be thrilled if I can look back 12 months from now and see all of these things accomplished.

No offense to New Year’s Resolutions, but those just seem too easy to quit or give up on. I plan to kick off the New Year with a much more intense commitment to exercising, eating better, and, as a result, losing pounds and losing body fat.

While on my long vacation, I developed a new plan that covers exercise and diet. On top of that, I am entering a friendly weight loss competition with my wife and some close relatives. There is a wedding happening in April so my wife along with the rest of the wedding party wants to lose some weight. We all picked a day to weigh-in each week, chose specific weight goals, and we will update each other on our progress every week. With about 6 people involved I think this will provide some great motivation and accountability.

I had previously set a goal of 225 pounds by March 1st, but given my slower than expected start, I figured I would need to tweak that anyway so I have made my new goal 225 pounds by April 2nd. This won’t be easy to achieve, but it is definitely possible. As of right now, that means I need to lose a little over 2 pounds per week. Yeah, I do realize that I still have to meet my first goal of 250 pounds, but I think I will get that done this week (I hope). 

You need to burn 3,500 calories to lose one pound of weight. In order to lose 2 pounds in a week I need to average a 1,000 calorie per day ‘burn rate’ (burning 1,000 more calories than I consume). According to this Mayo Clinic calorie calculator my base calorie burn rate per day should be roughly 2,300). I could burn 1,000 calories per day strictly through diet restriction, though that would leave me only able to eat about 1,300 calories per day.  That’s way too low and probably not healthy anyway. However, limiting my calorie intake to about 1,800 calories per day is much more realistic and that would leave me with a 500 calorie deficit to make up through exercise. That can be accomplished with about 30 minutes of jogging according to this calculator. One problem is that I can’t jog for 30 minutes straight right now, only about 5 minutes at a time. That number will come up soon and I’m just doing my best to keep the intensity up when I’m on the treadmill. So for now, until my shoulder pain goes away and I can start weightlifting again, my plan is 6 days of 30 minutes of cardiovascular exercise each week.

The combination of exercise and improvements to my diet will make this goal possible, but it is still a bit of a stretch. Also, I’m not really counting calories anymore, but instead I am working on a complete nutrition overhaul (not a diet), which includes eating 6 small meals per day. More on that later. All I can do now is go forward with my plans and see how the numbers play out on the scale over the coming weeks. Wish me luck!

This week also happens to be the last weigh-in of 2007. The New Year makes for a great time of reflection so I’ll take a moment to review where I’ve been with my weight. I actually started 2007 with the intention of losing weight before a close friend’s wedding in September. The first weigh-in I have recorded for the year was 262 pounds on January 8. Instead of losing weight for the wedding, I gained weight and that brought me to the start of this website, when I weighed in at 266 pounds in September. Yikes!

I am happy to report today that I weigh 251.6 pounds, 14.4 pounds less than when I started this website and 10.4 pounds less than when I started the year. I’m happy that I have a weight loss to report (rather than a gain), but I also have to look back at a lot of wasted time in 2007 that I could have used to work on my weight. Who knows how much better off I could be today. No sense in crying over the past though. I recognize that I wasted time and missed opportunities this year, but I will use that as motivation to do better in 2008.

Back in September I set a goal of weighing 250 pounds by December 1. As you can see, I missed that goal by at least one month now. I wish I could have done better, but I can’t complain about losing 14 pounds either. Again, I can look back at wasted time and opportunities and I must commit to working harder next year to reach my goals. 205 pounds by September 1 is not going to be easy. In fact, it hardly seems possible today given my recent history, but I am going to stick with it and see what I can do. I believe it is possible, but I know it won’t be easy.

Best of luck to everyone in the New Year with whatever goals you are trying to achieve. I am very busy battling both my debt and my weight, so look for a lot more content to come as I work my way through these problems. I will be documenting everything I do to find success (and talking about my failures) so be sure to follow along if you are fighting one or both of these same battles in 2008.

I need to lose weight. I want to lose weight. Sounds believable, doesn’t it? I think I believe it. However, I’m not doing much about it on a daily basis right now. I have had a little success so far, I’m down about 14 pounds since starting this blog, but I still have a lot of weight to lose and my progress has basically come to a stop over the past few weeks. Apparently thinking about losing weight and reading about it doesn’t actually cause you to lose weight!

It’s time for action. I don’t know why I can’t motivate myself to exercise regularly, but that has to change.

I need a plan. I made a plan before, but I didn’t write anything down. Now it’s time to change that. Here is my beginning exercise plan.

• Monday - Friday: 20 minutes on the treadmill, doing intense interval training on M, W, F and doing casual walking on T and Th. I’m also going to do sit-ups and push-ups immediately following my treadmill time, but I need to give that a try to see how to best balance the number of reps and how many days of the week I should do those before I make an official plan.
• Saturday - Sunday: one 30 minute weight lifting workout. I’m going for high intensity, minimal rest with this.

This is my simple plan. I want to start small- this is relatively small, though this is a massive improvement over what I am doing now.

What makes me think I can go from almost nothing to exercising 6 days a week? Well, I don’t exactly know how to answer that except to say that I HAVE to start working out. If I can’t spend about 2 and a half hours a week exercising I won’t be able to achieve my weight loss goals. I have to make exercise a habit.

There is no magic solution to help me start a regular exercise program. I have to take the initiative to wake up 20 minutes earlier and do the exercise. If I feel tired I have to push myself to get on the treadmill anyway. I don’t like the way I feel at my current weight and that isn’t going to change if I don’t do something about it- NOW.

I will use this blog as a source of accountability for my plan. Look for more posts about this over the next week or so. Please share your tips or ideas for getting started and overcoming this first hurdle. Now you can sit back and watch me succeed or fail!

No matter how well you have done with budgeting, cutting your spending, and tracking everything it is extremely easy to get bogged down in the daily grind and feel like you aren’t getting anywhere. I believe this is the hardest part of the process. Depending on the size of your debt balance and the size of your income, you could be looking at years to get out of debt, maybe decades.

There are essentially two levels of debt freedom. One is obvious- having no debt at all. The other is being debt free except for the mortgage. This distinction is made because a mortgage is generally thought of as good debt (I don’t agree, at least not on a long term basis), but saving up the cash to pay for a house is rather difficult and most of us end up with a mortgage when we want to own a home. I want to be 100% debt free and that is my goal, but I will feel a lot better about my debt load once I am debt free except for the mortgage.

Right now, seeing my debt balance gives me a sickening feeling deep down and really motivates me to work hard at getting out of debt. I don’t know if that feeling will go away when I am down to just a mortgage (frankly I hope it does not), but some of the pressure should be off by that time. That pressure and sickening feeling can both motivate you and discourage you. You need to recognize that you have these feelings and think about why you feel that way and what you need to do to change your situation. Nothing will improve if you don’t take action to improve it.

You really need to think about what being debt free means to you and most importantly what it means to you in the long term. For me, being debt free is about freedom. Freedom to not take a job because I need the money and it is a tolerable way to pay the bills. I don’t want to settle for that, but at this point in my life I need to make that choice. I have so much debt that I need my ‘day job’ plus extra work to make my way out of debt.

Don’t get all fired up and work hard for a month and then fizzle out. That is exactly how I have started just about every life changing process I have ever attempted in the past. It’s scary to say things are different this time, but things really are different this time. I am going slowly and making real habit changes. Not superficial changes that only last a short while. You can’t succeed by doing that. You need to go slowly, you need to make small changes that you can handle, and you need to maintain those changes. The steps you take toward becoming debt free need to become habits, natural parts of your life that you live on a daily basis. You need a solid foundation. That is why you should go slowly. Don’t expect to get out of debt overnight. Think about how long it took you to get into debt and allow plenty of time to get out.

In this Get Out of Debt Series, I have outlined many tools and methods for making a successful financial turnaround. I believe this series can be the solid foundation you use to support your journey out of debt. Everything I have talked about here is exactly what I am doing and I know that it works. I know that it is now only a matter of time until I am done with debt. Start your journey today and please feel free to post comments on this site or contact me via email if you need help or encouragement along the way.

9 Steps to Get Out of Debt

• # 1 Stop Borrowing Money
• # 2 (a) Why You Should Make a Budget
• # 2 (b) How to Make a Budget
• # 3 Turn Your Junk Into Cash
• # 4 Create an Emergency Fund
• # 5 Live Below Your Means
• # 6 Track Your Spending and Update Your Budget
• # 7 Visual Reminders to Track Your Debt
• # 8 Make Yourself Accountable
• # 9 Be Patient and Don’t Give Up