This month I am taking a leaf out of Katy Kickers book and blogging my aims for the month in the hope it will keep me motivated by making myself accountable to everyone reading the blog. Usually if I say stuff to other people, or blog about a plan it helps keep me on track a bit better…it has always helped with my weight loss in the past if I knew people were expecting my weekly updates after weight day!! So thank you Katy for the idea, and you can check out her October Aims here.
Gosh can you actually believe its October already! This year has been a bit of a weird one hasn’t it. Lockdown and covid have been utter shit, but little Miss Effie arrived safely in our lives, we’ve spent a lot of quality time together we would never have usually had the chance of, and for me the months have flown by. But honestly other than getting through pregnancy I feel like I’ve achieved very little during the last few months, other than surviving daily life, and now I need to start altering that mindset and getting in some productivity…hence the monthly aims list! So I’m hoping I can keep this going and make it a regularly monthly feature if you guys find it interesting, so let me know if you do. It will help give me some targets to work towards tight are bigger than my daily to do list.
I’ve broken my goals down into 4 main areas for this first month so here are my aims for October 2020
Family Life Aims for this month
One of the big things Jon and I (and probably half the country) have realised during lockdown is we have too much crap in our house!! So we really want to keep decluttering and sorting out our home. I did Marie Kondo a few years ago and we reduced a lot, and certain areas of our home are fine, our kitchen for instance is down to only basic items we use. But areas like clothing and kids toys have definitely crept back up. I spent a lot of time sorting all the kids clothing we had in storage so I could size and photograph all the boys clothes that were too small for Elian in the hope of selling lots of them on. This has been going well but now I would like to shift the remaining items, so that is something I want to get done this month. (I also have 0-3 of Effie’s stuff now too!!)
Something else we have been doing during lock down is meal planning. This was mainly due to the need to online shop. We always used click and collect before lockdown but it was easy to nip to shop if I forgot stuff, but at the start of lockdown I was shielding as I was pregnant so it became more essential to be organised and purchase everything needed. So I would love to keep meal planning and aim to stick to it as closely as I can.
Lastly for family life is I would like to try and stick to our ‘Screen Free Sundays’ which is something we started a few weeks ago. Screens all go off after breakfast (including my phone, Im only allowed to use it for a few photos if I want some) and we play, have the radio on and go for walks if weather permits. Then at 5pm me and kids all shower, get in PJs and we all sit down with pizza, popcorn and a movie (at the moment we are working through Disney Classics!) Its been a lovely day to spend as a family and to reset for the next week
Blogging Aims for this month
This month for most bloggers is ‘Get all your Christmas gift guide shizz organised, photographed and blogged month’, so that is the big thing that needs sorting. I’d like to have all received items photographed and written up by the end of the month so they are ready to post first week of November.
Secondly I have 3 product reviews which I need to write for baby products we have been testing out, so they are also a priority. We have photographed them all last month so it is just a case of getting the posts written now.
Lastly I would like to create new pins for my halloween posts and update some old Christmas posts and gift guides, give them a little refresh, and create new pins for them for my Pinterest. Fingers crossed this might give them a little kick on the old SEO and click front
Financial Aims for this month
I’m still not 100% comfortable blogging openly about our finances, its still one of those weird subjects isn’t it! But I will say during lockdown I decided to start looking into the Dave Ramsey Method in a bit more detail. I found it over a year ago but wasn’t in the right head space at the time to commit to it but finally felt ready to revisit it. One thing lock down has taught us is that our income is not stable. Yes when the world is running normally our business does well, it supports our little family, but that obviously hasn’t been the case with lockdown restrictions. And the government cant be trusted to support us either (yeah don’t get me started on that subject!). Luckily me and Jon have a few other income streams, other businesses, side hustles etc so we have managed to get by. I know a lot of people recently have been investing in cryptocurrency, so this is something we might explore further. We just want to be sure before we invest any money, we so we are going to research any platforms before we use them. This Bitcoin Prime Test, for example, will be very useful. But even so, we have other irons in the fire as well.
So this has led me to these little financial aims for the month, that tie into some of my other aims.
- Aim to stay on budget for the month – I found one of the big things I slip on is food shopping, so making the meal plan each week and giving my self a shopping budget for the month has really helped me to stay on plan with this. Take aways/fast food is often a slip up for us so I have tried to work it in to once a week, that way we aren’t going cold turkey and can still treat ourselves but do it sensibly
- Continue to track all my expenses so I can see exactly where my money is going each month
- Sell on the kids clothing and other unwanted items we find when decluttering. I’ve been using both eBay and Facebook market place to help shift items so far and I want to continue doing this.
- I set myself a side hustle target of making an extra £200 a month that I pay off my personal debt. I do this using the above online sales, surveys, receipt apps and anything else I find to hustle a little extra money on the side. Ive hit my target for 3 months running, so fingers crossed
Heres an old post I wrote on how to make money online with a few great side hustles anyone can do from home.
Business Aims for this month
We’ve finally been able to reopen our little Forever Loved store after lockdown issues and little Miss’s arrival but for now Jon is doing most of the work. This month we have decided to also open an Etsy store to help us reach a new client base until the store is a little more established. So that is this months aim, get at least 10 products onto our etsy store and get our first etsy sale if possible.
Photography business wise the only goal for this month is to sort our christmas set up and open bookings on that. We are doing this later than usual as we are very aware lockdown could happen again or rules can change and may mean we are unable to do them all, which is frustrating and worrying as they usually make up a big proportion of our end of year income.
So there you have it…thats lots for me to be getting on with this month!
Do you have any plans of aims
