Ringing in the New Year

Happy New Year! I know a lot of bloggers out there are posting their New Year Resolutions over the next couple days, and I guess I'm jumping on this bandwagon once again.

First things first. We need to revisit last year's resolutions and see how well those went.

• Help friend plan her wedding. Success! Her wedding turned out absolutely beautiful. You can see pictures from that special day here.
• Learn to live with a roommate. Although the friend we were initially allowing to move in with us figured out other arrangements, we did take on a roommate in November. We're doing it to help out an old friend of ours who moved from the panhandle and is settling in at a new job before finding a different living arrangement. So far I think things are going well, so we'll mark this one as a success as well!
• Purchase a new car for hubby. Again, another success! We weren't able to save up enough money to pay for the car outright like we were initially hoping, so we did have to take out a car loan. Luckily, we should be able to have the car paid off before the end of this year.
• Work on our debt snowball. Wow, we are on a roll - this is another success! It was slow going at first, but we've made some major headway these past couple months. Even with the holidays, we've managed to pay down my car loan to within two months of being paid off. There are no words to describe how good that feels!
• Have another successful year of teaching AP. And the ball keeps on rolling.... This past year we did have a higher pass rate, only by 3%, but still a higher pass rate. What makes me feel good is that the AP program at our school currently ranks the highest in our district. So even though I was hoping for a slightly higher passing rate, I'm still really proud of what the kids accomplished last year.
• Get into better shape. And this is where the ball stops rolling... Yeah, total fail. I actually weigh more now than I did last January. And that 5K I wanted to run? I trained for all of 3 weeks and gave up. Yep. Epic fail. Oh well. There's always this year, right?
• Try more foods. I started out doing really great on this one with my recipe resolutions. But then I lost steam and stopped cooking them completely.
• Stress less at school. Again, this one is so-so. During the Fall semester, I think I do pretty well at maintaining an appropriate level of stress. But when it comes to the Spring semester, that whole idea goes out the window.

On to this year's resolutions...

• Swim with the manatees. This one is already in the works. Dan received a voucher for his birthday to go swimming in Crystal River with the manatees. Hopefully within the next month or so we'll be checking this one off the list.

• Go Camping. We just found a little camping facility a few miles away from home that looks like the perfect place to camp. The only problem? We don't have a tent. Or sleeping bags. Or basically anything that you need to go camping. But we've been talking about wanting to go camping for a while.

• Travel to Key West. Or anywhere really. But we're hoping for Key West. I've been in the past, but Dan's never been. We've been talking about going on a vacation for a little while now, and the Keys seems like the perfect place to escape and relax.

• Pay off both cars. As I mentioned above, we're so close to having my car paid off. And we're hoping Dan's car should be paid off by October/November. And once that's done, we're planning on...
• Saving up 3-6 month emergency fund. This one probably won't be done before the year is over, but we definitely want to get a start on it. The Dave Ramsey plan says this is the next step after paying off all of our debt. Technically, Dan will still have a student loan in his dad's name to pay off. But, we're making the choice to put that on hold (basically only make minimum payments and save everything else) because of our next goal...
• Get pregnant. When we got married we said that we'd wait until our debt was paid off before getting pregnant. And then we bought another car, which pushed back that plan. But we'll hopefully be starting that crazy journey before the year is over. We have no idea if we'll have problems conceiving (I've been told in the past I might have difficulties getting pregnant), but we're excited to start the next chapter in our family.

So that's it. I'm definitely looking forward to 2013!

What resolutions have you made this year? Or maybe you've chosen not to make resolutions at all. Would love to hear about them!