Just Reston and Relaxin'...and looking ahead to '08

So far today we've been taking it easy. Matt is rediscovering beloved video games from the past via versions for Mac, and I've been tooling around with the blog(s) and various other Internet pursuits. Thanks to everybody who has voted so far regarding where to host the blog, although at this point it's a draw--so if you haven't voted yet, please do!

We've also partaken in some of our favorite pioneer-style farm chores, like making soup stock and boiling rags.

Otherwise, we're taking our time off as a chance to reflect on our priorities for the upcoming year. 2007 has been a year of immense change for us (getting married, traveling, moving twice, finishing a master's, starting law school, leaving law school, starting a total of three new jobs between the two of us), and one which has definitely brought us closer together. On the whole, we could not be happier with our lives and feel so incredibly blessed to have each other, as well as two loving families standing behind us. In that vein, a lot of what we hope for in the next year is a continuation of things we've already started. Here's the list I've compiled so far of goals for 2008:

Do 30 minutes of activity every day, and closer to 60 on the weekends. As you may know, we've already started working on this one. We were hoping to go an entire year without missing a day, starting a few weeks ago, but we did miss two days while we were out of town. So we're hoping to start fresh for the new year, and make it straight through. We find this works better than a goal like "exercise 4-5 times a week," because it's just too easy to fall into the habit of thinking that today will be the day off and we'll exercise the other 4-5 days a week. This makes it simpler: if we haven't exercised yet today, then we still need to do it.

Use the car as little as we can. This is one of the main benefits of having moved to a smaller town, and we'd like to maximize it as much as we can. It's better for us, better for our budget, and better for the environment to walk and use public transportation as much as we can. We already try to accomplish an errand or two (pick up a prescription, rent a movie) on our daily walks, and each walk to work as much as we can, so we'd like to keep this up and make it even more of a habit.

Go back to cash envelopes for the Groceries and Entertainment categories of expenditure. We did this while we were saving up to pay for our wedding and it worked remarkably well. One sticky spot in doing it here is that we still don't have a local bank from which to make fee-free ATM withdrawals--we've been so happy with US Bank (and having our sister-in-law as a personal go-to banking reference) that we've been hesitant to change. Bank of America has tons of branches and ATMs and even offers a $100 bonus for signing up, but we've heard terrible things about their customer service and about the borderline-fraudulent ways that they will strategically process withdrawals and deposits in order to hit you hard with overdraft charges. Because of that, we're considering an ING Electric Orange account, which is attractive because it's an interest-earning checking account with free online banking. (We'd also get a $25 bonus thanks to a referral from my brother.) On the other hand, they don't have physical branches or actual physical checks, which seems like it might be troublesome, say, when we're asked to provide a voided check for direct deposit at work. One of our sub-goals is to figure all of this out.

Pay off both car loans by August. The astute among you will recognize that that is loans plural when we only have one car. That's one fact that makes it compelling to get these paid off, but they are also our two smallest loans (ala the debt snowball), they coincidentally have the highest interest, and paying them off by August will drop our monthly debt payments by $300--just in time for me to go back to school, hopefully.

Learn more about investing. While Matt is passionate about the arts and I about women's health and birth, we'd be lying if we said that we didn't dread it when one of our fabulously low-key weekends winds to a close and we have to go back to work. To that end, we'd love to get to the point where we had more options regarding how and when and how much to work, especially once kids enter the picture. Opening up new income streams via investing would be a potential way to meet this goal. Since most of our income this year (and the next several) will be devoted to paying off debt, it makes it a convenient and risk-free time to learn all I can about investing so that when we are in a position to do it, we'll have a solid understanding of how it works.

Continue to make an effort to eat high-quality unprocessed foods. This kind of speaks for itself. It also speaks to our goals on health and money, as well as sparks our creativity in the kitchen (homemade Thin Mints, anybody?).

Continue to make our relationship not just a priority, but the priority. I firmly believe that this is a key to any high-functioning household, whether or not there are kids involved. I remember being relatively young and hearing my dad say "I love my kids and I'd lay down my life for them, but when they grow up and move on, you'll be glad you invested time in your relationship with your spouse." Or something to that effect. I feel like knowing my parents made each other this kind of priority helped me grow up with a sense of security in something bigger than myself, and I hope our kids grow up the same way. Even right now, the other goals we make are pretty pointless if we're not working toward them together. Because of that, we've made communication and teamwork central to the way we run our lives. While it's tempting to pound out crazy overtime and pay off our debts even faster, I believe that it's ultimately more valuable to tackle it steadily while making sure there's time for us to enjoy each other. Obviously there are times in life when this isn't an option, but hopefully those periods are brief and finite. Our goal in paying off debts and saving money is to have more time to enjoy the things in life that matter to us, not less--so we try not to be penny-wise and pound-foolish with our time.