Today is the first day...

... of the rest of our lives. Cliche? Absolutely. Today, it also happens to be true. My wife and I have embarked on a journey that began just a little over an hour ago. It's a decision we made last week when we looked around at our lives, realized we were extremely happy with each other, but not at all happy with our situation. In the next few months, we will "officially" reach our mid 40's as we both turn 44, and our finances and our physical condition has gotten worse. We've aged and gotten no closer to our goals of financial freedom, freedom from smoking, and freedom from living in the rat race.

I came to a decision last week as I sat on facebook and wasted several hours doing nothing, that I was going to change my life a little bit at a time. In the past, I've looked at all the things I wanted to do and basically just thrown my hands up in the air thinking, "It's just too much!!!" Then I went back to watching a movie or playing around on the computer to escape the reality that my life had become. We are not destitute by any means, but we are not thriving. I am ready to thrive.

So I came up with an idea. I had always told my daughter that if she wanted to improve herself, she should do it little by little. Then, I looked in the mirror. Duh! I was NOT practicing what I preached. If you have to clean the kitchen, do you do the dishes, wipe the counter, sweep and mop the floor and clean the microwave all at the same time? Of course not. So why should I look at "cleaning my life up" any differently.

Financial experts always tell you that you have to budget your money. I decided it was time to budget my time. Yes, I can still chat with old friends on facebook. Yes, I can still go goof off on my xbox. I can still pop in a movie, or sleep in late on Sunday if I feel like it. But, and Dawn has decided to go along with me on this, (wow, 2 conjunctions to start a sentence. Mr. Anderson would be proud.) we are spending 1 hour a day on doing something toward attaining our goals. Just 1 hour. If we want to do more, then so be it. 1 hour is the minimum. Every day.

I hope you find this interesting. I will be blogging every night explaining what we did to further ourselves that day. I expect most of our steps to be small, especially at this early stage of the process. Today, we moved a few things out of the living room, brought in an excercise machine from the garage and worked out for only 5 minutes each. We both need to get in shape, and our backs will force us to take it slowly. I started a blog. Dawn set up her account at Google Reader to follow websites devoted to scrapbooking, something she loves and would love to start some kind of business with. Tomorrow will bring more baby steps. I'll also go into more detail about some of our goals. Hope you'll come along for the ride.
John