One area where I definitely need to be more self reliant is socially. I am not an outgoing person. I like people easily, but I have difficulty instigating social interactions. I’m not sure why that is, but I’ve come to the conclusion that why doesn’t matter. You don’t always need to know why something is a problem to fix it.
I need to become more comfortable approaching people. I can do it, but I suspect I miss more opportunities than I grab onto because I automatically assume that people do not want to talk to me. This is as much a reason why I just took a job in sales. I need to get over my fear of approaching people, and this seems like a good opportunity. The company’s owner is aware of my problem and is very supportive. He’s been there, and he wants to help.
Tomorrow is my first foray onto the¨battlefield. There is a business development seminar I’ll be attending, with several opportunities for networking. Certainly I am interested in some of the classes that will be taught, but my primary reason for being there is to make contacts that will lead to sales. This is going to be a tough day. Eleven hours of discomfort.
Today seems as good a day as any to officially announce the official beginning of my plan to become self reliant. This is my sixtieth post on this blog. I started a new job today. We just had one whopper of a thunderstorm rip through the valley, giving everything a good washing.
So here’s the deal. I am setting self reliance goals for the next year. Note that I do not expect to be self reliant by that time, only that I will have significant progress to show in each area. And what are those areas, you might ask? You might, but you’re notoriously quiet at times like these, so I’ll ask for you. Those areas are:
Health
Employment
Home Storage
Financial
Emergency Preparedness
Social
Note: I reserve the right to change this as time goes on. That’s another goal.
So what are my goals for the coming year?
Health – I will work up to the point where I can jog three times a week for half an hour, and do stretching and muscular conditioning three other days each week. On the seventh day we shall rest.
(Current State: Today I am only walking the dog briskly every morning for 15-20 minutes.)
Employment – I will become an expert at social media marketing, both at the individual and business level.
– I will be in stable employment I enjoy, making no less than $48,000 gross per year.
(Current State: Today I started a position selling social media services on a strictly commission basis. In short, I am fully employed, but fully unpaid. I know a fair bit about social media, but am far from considering myself an expert).
Home Storage – I will have in storage a minimum of six months worth of the basic staples and primary foodstuff my family uses regularly. Everything will be on a rotation plan that is carried out no less than quarterly.
(Current State: We have something of nearly everything we use regularly in storage, but the amount varies from a few weeks to eight months or more.)
Financial – This is largely dependent on the Employment goal above, but I will be putting at least 10% of our income back into our savings and investments with the goal of:
Replacing any principle we had to take from our retirement savings (We have not had to touch the principle as yet).
Restore our emergency savings back up to pre-layoff levels of 2009. (Amazingly enough, it’s still within a few thousand dollars of that point now).
Returning to fully funding our retirement programs each year. (We’re obviously not doing this currently)
Putting money away toward our next trip home to visit the in-laws.
(Note: These goals are subject to change if my financial adviser recommends a different priority)
Emergency Preparedness – I will research and define a minimal level of preparedness for our family. We will achieve that level within the year.
Social – This is a big one for me. I am basically an introvert. I use that knowledge of my introversion as a crutch to not have to connect with people. This has not served me as well as I often like to think. I stink at networking, which is probably one reason why I have been significantly underemployed for over a year now. I could blame the economy, but the fact is, most jobs are found by networking, and I have not done hardly any. This must change.
– I will overcome my fear of cold-contacting people.
– I will make contact with a different person in my network each week.
And now for a few goals not directly related to my own self reliance, but to this site:
– I will establish a full definition of each of the above areas, including a means of assessing one’s level of self reliance in each area and the steps needed to get there.
– I will establish a newsletter for all those interested in taking specific, regular action in their own lives to achieve self reliance as well.
– I will establish a more complete and in-depth site that not only serves as a great resource for achieving self reliance, but allows me compensation for my efforts here. Yes, that means I do plan to monetize this site eventually. I may as well be up front about that now. I would like to make money doing what I love.
But rest assured that I will not do so unless a) I am am providing sufficient value to you, and b) it won’t not become intrusive or the focus of the site. If I’m doing good work and helping you improve your lives I think that should be worth a little something–especially if you get something out of it at the same time.
So there it is. What do you think? I’m open to your comments about my goals–especially my goals for this site. Let me know what you think.
The key is to keeping your monthly spending down is to focus on the variable cost items in your budget. If you can’t cut out things like rent or your mortgage, or your cell phone bill if you have to have one, then you need to look for other ways to spend less each month.
At the time of this writing, things are tough. Money is tight, so the budget needs to follow suit. Take a look at your own monthly budget and try to find ways to slim down your variable costs. Here are some areas you can start looking to cut down:
Carolyn Grimsley’s little girls just would not stop doing laundry.
“We’re loving it,” Grimsley said as 7-year-old Katherine and 4-year-old Camille got to work. Dunk the scarves. Scrub them on a washboard. Pin them to the clothesline. Chores that somehow get fascinating when they’re history instead of work.
This is above is a quote from an article in the Longmont Times-Call about the nearby Agricultural Heritage Center. I’m sure kids from the age when that was the normal means of washing clothes would be flabbergasted to hear kids today calling such work “fun”.
And yet, I think kids can learn to find work fun. Last weekend I continued my project of tearing down my deck. My kids are regularly on the prowl for small jobs they can do to earn some money, so I offered my boys a dollar to pick up all the screws and nails laying around. That didn’t last them very long, but later on my middle child came back outside to help. He found he could clear away the smaller scraps of wood I was making. Soon he was telling me how fun it was. I think he caught a bit of the satisfaction that comes from hard work on a project that shows tangible progress.
I have to admit as a kid there were many projects that I began with less than a good attitude because my parents told me to. But before the work was done I often found myself enjoying it at least a little. Work is even more fun if it’s someone else’s work. I remember gladly pitching in to help my friends with their chores, even while avoiding my own.
It’s interesting how work is increasingly undervalued these days, and yet companies like Home Depot make their fortunes off the satisfaction that comes from doing work yourself. As my mother says, “A change is as good as a holiday.” Doing different work from what we normally do is often the only difference we need.
Self Reliance Exchange has a great article on what items to keep in your car in case of emergencies when you may be driving in extreme conditions:
Many things should be in all vehicles, but there more things that can be needed or required for extreme conditions. Recently, I have been researching 4×4 off-roading and beach buggying and discovered there are tools and equipment that are either required or needed that could benefit people even in everyday conditions.
Read the whole thing. Many of those items don’t seem all that extreme to me. But then I live in the northwest where during winter just getting across town can be extreme conditions.
When we bought this house nearly five years ago one of the things that impressed us was the back deck. It was large! We could have a whole party out there. We forgot two small facts. For one, we are not “party” people. For another, there are only three real seasons in Idaho: too cold to go outside, too wet and windy to go outside, and too hot to go outside.
Needless to say, our deck has not had a lot of use in five years. Since I lost my job last year we started joking about all that wasted space, and that perhaps we should cut holes in the deck and turn some of it into planter boxes or something. The joking began to turn serious. A few weeks ago we decided it was time to get rid of the deck. We need the space for more garden, and can make do with a much smaller outside sitting space. It was time to dismantle the deck.
Let me just start by saying that the deck was added well after the house was initially built. Whomever built it did a much better job than the company that built our house. This deck was designed to last! I’m fully confident we could put our upright grand piano on it with no worry about it breaking the deck at all.
Of course this means that tearing down the deck has been a slow process. Not that I’ve had much time to devote to it, but even with the time I’ve had it seems as if I’m making no progress. I had to start by cutting through the decking boards to expose the structure underneath to get an understanding of how it’s built. Then I had to figure out how to remove the railing without destroying the flower beds and sprinkler riser around the outside of it. It sometimes feels like dismantling a ship in a bottle. But I am making some headway.
We’re still holding on to hope that I’ll have the deck taken down and the new garden beds put in while there is still time to plant something. But then it’s already mid-May, and I’ve only got the rails and a tenth of the deck down. Tomorrow I will devote most of the day to it. That will probably be my “make-or-break” day. Our future gardening efforts hang in the balance!
StarBird Farm has an interesting post about deciding what to grow in your garden. This has long been a question for us as well. For example, our first year we grew potatoes. They grew quite well. This is Idaho, after all. But then it probably cost us more to grow those potatoes than we can pick them up locally. This is Idaho, after all. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to grow a lot of foods that you can obtain locally quite inexpensively.
On the other hand, we do well with strawberries, and they are not cheap to buy. Ours also taste a lot better than the ones you buy in the store. We often joke about forgetting about everything else and just growing strawberries.
Of course another option is to still plant things you can grow easily even if you can buy them cheaply. Even though most vegetables are cheap when they are in season, they go up in price quite a bit at other times of the year. When they are cheap, go ahead and stock up and store them for the off season. Then you are able to enjoy that food cheaply year round.
This year we’re going to take that approach. We’re planting a lot of tomatoes–something we eat a lot of in various forms–so that we actually get enough to do something with. We’ll let you know how it goes.
Mother’s Day means two main traditions around our house: 1) Dad makes biscuits for breakfast, and 2) Dad tries a brand new recipe for dinner. Which usually leads to a third: Dad makes a huge mess in the kitchen.
I enjoy cooking. But I don’t do it often enough to where I really know the arrangement of things in the kitchen. I’m always looking for things, which usually leads to a fair amount of stress, as I’m often supposed to be adding the ingredient I’m looking for right now!
So when we ran out of baking powder mid-way into making biscuit dough it should have been a stressful moment. But not this time. While I may not know the layout of my wife’s kitchen cupboards, I DO know where our food storage is. I immediately knew to check the box on top of the partial wall along one side of the kitchen. The one labeled “Baking Powder”, where we keep extra cans of baking powder (amazing how that works). But we were out there, too.
Not to worry. I know my wife would not leave us short on baking powder. She’s too good a shopper for that. She’d have stocked up as soon as she knew we were running low. She just hadn’t gotten as far as putting them in the box atop the wall yet. So where else would she put them? Downstairs storage closet, of course. Easily found. Probably avoided.
And that’s how food storage saved Mother’s Day (or at least Daddy’s hide).
Lauren over at Path Across has posted her experience in having her herb garden die so that we can learn from it.
It’s not easy to admit defeat, especially when I like to go around telling people that they ought to use their backyards and front yards and porches to grow gardens. Especially when I look forward to the day that I have the space to grow my own “edible jungle.” How can I do either of these things when I can’t even nurture a windowsill herb garden?
There is a class of people who claim that they have a “black thumb,” i.e., they end up killing any plant in their immediate vicinity. I’m afraid I might be one of those people.
Self Reliance Exchange has an article up on the importance of water and how to get some in a pinch. In this case the problem was localized to their own home, but it’s a good reminder. We need water, and it’s good to have some on hand. It doesn’t all have to be drinkable to be useful. Even the slimiest rain barrel water can be used to flush your toilet at least.
Still, having a supply of water on hand to last for a while can be important–if not critical. Especially for people like me who live in a desert.
