The Ultimate Incentive natters on. Part 9

shrimpy_80

Oooh Lara, that pouffe is fab! My cats would destroy that in about 30 seconds flat though! I've already taken the tree down as I got fed up of getting up in the morning to find it stripped bare and a tangle of baubles and tinsel strewn across the lounge floor.

I'm also excited to hear about the challenge. I'm not bothering with New Year's resolutions as such but looking forward to being debt free 2013 and a fresh sig update tomorrow. New year, new start and all!

Birdie85

Yes, come on then, what's this challenge?!

Hope you're enjoying being back at home Lara! One day with my in-laws in more than enough, would hate to be stuck with them for days on end!

Oh and that pouffe is so cool!

Hope you get more time to keep in touch Flower! Hope Noah had a good time.

Our tree went down on Friday. I got home at lunch time and everything was down and packed away, OH had been on a de-Christmassing mission all morning! It was a bit of a shock but at least I didn't have to do it, I hate that job!

Stuck in the office today and on a mini silent strike, why do we have to be here?! Hope they send us home super early!

As for resolutions, I'm not really going to make any but I do plan on losing my 'Turkey Belly' as OH is calling it! :eek: Not good at all!

Dinah93

Sorry Pilchard, been kept busy by my little miss who no longer sleeps, and the kindle NIM gave me for Christmas.

Okay, I'm really excited about this challenge. I've been waiting for it to come around for ages. We've had a lot of threadie challenges on here, to ebay, to loose weight, to clear/save a certain ammount, but I'm hoping this one will strike a cord with everyone and get you all as fired up as I am - New Year, New Start.

So the challenge - De-Junk January. De-Junk January is all about what is holding you back from where you want to be. It's about simplifying your life to focus on what really matters to you. So the challenge is to clear 10 things a day for the entire of January from your home or life. An example would be sending a bag of clothes to the charity shop, or sticking a stack of CDs from your attic onto music magpie. You can also count things like loosing 1lb in weight (or a kg if you want to make things harder on yourself). If you have niggly drawers of paperwork then clearing a drawer will count as one (not per piece of paper! I could tidy my study and be done with the challenge by teatime), or cutting emotional junk - finally deleting the phone number of your ex for example. You can count anything you want so long as it is a complete thing, no partial clears. You count items as they leave your house or life - while intentions are great just sticking 20 things on ebay doesn't count unless they all sell and leave! The hope is that everyone will find a life dejunk helpful, it will clear your debt, boost your savings, give you fewer things to dust, make it easier to find things when you need them. The one exception is debts, if you clear a whole debt, whether that's £20 owed to your mum or £8000 owed to barclaycard, that's 10 clears you can count - because as far as I'm concerned clearing a debt is one of the biggest weights off your mind there can be.

10 a day is our minimum, the aim is to clear as much as you can and enter February feeling much lighter and more focussed. While at first 10 a day might seem daunting, there will be easy clears and hard clears, a stack of cds to music magpie will be a fast few days, clearing a stack of paperwork a bit more hassle, finally getting that tax return out the way a whole lot more effort. But short and sharp for 31 days will hopefully kickstart a whole new future.

So, I hope as many people as possible will join in, and at the end of the month we can put a nice big roll call count up of how much less fussy, cluttered and complicated we've made our little worlds.

Dinah93

And as far as new years resolutions go, I was thinking, how about we look at this more positively - where do we want to be on 31st December 2013? What changes do we want to have enacted in the next year, or challenges to meet. I'll post the list of our imagined lives next year, and we can see how we did - how does that sound?

For us -
B debt free
Reach goal weights of (115lbs/154lbs)
Have completed Hell of The North for charity
Have kept Grace hospital free (unexpected inpatient admissions)
Be ready to start trying for baby 2
Have £10,000 saved (£5000 for Grace, £5000 for us)
Have completed dayzero project (330 days left, 44 done)
Have replaced our fence and cleared all the garden rubble so Grace can play outside

Lara44

Happy New Year everyone!!!! :j :j Hope you're all going to be enjoying yourselves this evening.

I'm well up for some New Year resolutions, Dinah. We have all the clutter of one built-in wardrobe in the kitchen ready for Freecycling. That really must go in the next few weeks.

In January we also cook a new dinner every day from all of our cook books. It's great fun.

Beyond that my mission will be getting words written.

And Day Zero of course, only 27% done :eek:

Dinah93

Happy New Year everyone - any exciting celebrations? We were thrilled to get Grace in bed, and staying in bed by 7.30, we were bad parents and wouldn't let her have a nap after 4pm, she was allowed 5 mins in my arms as she was falling asleep stood up on NIMs knee, but that was it. This is the first time all week she's gone to bed without screaming and asleep before 10pm, so it was brilliant. I made us a nice dinner (first time in a long time I've properly cooked, been relying on toast far too much of late) of salmon en croute, rosemary crushed potatoes and roast veg. Back on the diet wagon today though - 2lbs gained over Christmas.

First day of de-junk January, NIM is planning to sort out our kitchen cupboards while I want to sort out some books to shift (does anyone know anything I can do with paperbacks? Amazon never makes a profit on them so all I can think of is charity?), he's also taking our tree down today, and I'd quite like to get a walk to the park in at some point as it's decent weather.

clearmydebts

Absolutely love this challenge. Count me in 100%. We have guests staying with us, so won't be able to start until tomorrow. But I will be back with resolutions etc.

Happy New Year to all x

ruby_eskimo

Happy New Year everyone! Hope you all had a good celebration, mine continued along the same vein as Christmas to be honest but I did get to see some fireworks which was nice.

I'd love to join in the Challenge. I may have no clutter in the flat here, but my old bedroom in my parents house is chock with boxes of stuff that I clearly don't need. So I'll take a couple of weekends in January to go and sort it all out and see what I can get rid of. As well as the weight I want to shift as well, I'm sure I can get rid of 310 items from my life by the beginning of February.

Here's to a great new year everyone!

Dinah93

Today going well, NIM is completely reorganising the kitchen, which is brilliant as we can finally see what food we have (and we might even be able to get Grace's food out her bedroom and into the kitchen), plus it's getting a good clean as he goes.

I'm listing on Amazon, as it can take quite a while to sell things. Lots of cookbooks and craft books, the fiction so far isn't worth selling so will need to keep investigating ways to shift that.

tinkerbel

Happy Christmas and new year everyone! Sounds like everyone had a lovely time! Reality is starting to set back in for me as we are back at work tomorrow need to get a few things sorted at home but probably won't be able to do it tonight as we won't have time. Would have been nice to get organised before 'term' of work starts tomorrow but hey!
I can't do the jan challenge (sounds good though!) as I'm away a lot over jan/feb and there's only so much of this sort of challenge that you can do remotely! I'll watch and cheerleader though from the sidelines and make a conscious effort to sort things out when I am at home!

I haven't checked my bank since the start of December due to fear but checked today.. Not too bad as we got paid early but the cc bill is huge (I buy everything on there then pay it off) think its over 1k which scares me as I'm not sure how it has crept up so much! Need to work out how much of that balance is work expenses (hopefully a lot!) and the rest is just Christmas I guess! Caught up with lots of people over the break and spent some nice time with my mum so worth the cost.. Just means jan/feb are going to be tight.. We got paid early in dec so it'll feel like ages till payday and it's general January tightness! Ah well!
Any other good challenges going on? Are you doing 15nsds / month Cinny?

Looks like everyone got some lovely Christmas presents and Im glad you sound well Shrimpy! Can't believe you got a kindle Dinah you lucky girl!