my goal for the year

my new goal  is to use the materials God has already entrusted to me to manage and to avoid buying new "anything" whenever it is possible. there are 3 ways i plan to acheive my goal.

use it up: i will not buy any more hair product until i use up what i already have, i will not buy more tea bags because i think the ones i have may be old, i also pledge to do better with eating leftovers and scraps of leftover food (i will call it casserole)

wear it out: i will fix it, patch it or rig it up to work (prefer the first two options but the third may have to do sometimes) 

make it do: this one has been engrained in my very make up, we fairbanks are resourceful to the core. but i will give some examples anyway. who needs a fancy desk organizer, save tin cans, small jars and little boxes to arrange in your drawers, the bonus here is you get to do it your way. use old socks and tee shirts for spills and cleaning, you were going to throw them away anyway, might as well make em' useful one last time. clothes pins are indespensable in my house we use them as chip clips, clip notes to the calendar with them and the #1 use toys (yep he just got a whole santa sack full of toys and a clothes pin with a face drawn on it still wins his favor) this category is literally endless, so i will stop here.

there are also a couple of questions i will ask myself before i buy anything. trips to wal-mart may become mentally exhausting..

#1 how will this item make my life better?

#2 do i already have something like this?

#3 do i need this right now?

now i want to tell you the main motivation behind my goal. our family budget has NO wiggle room, i am not exaggerating when i say it is a miracle when we get all of our bills paid without using any of our quickly dwindling savings, we praise God every week when this happens and it keeps on happening every week. during my prayer times (too few, i admit, but thats another post for another time) God is showing me how i can simplify my life and how i can encourage other women to do the same. step one i achieved by accident, we got rid of cable last summer and i stopped seeing, every day, what the world was telling  me my life should be like.  step 2 is stop buying stuff, i started this with my buy nothing christmas and then ran into the quote in the picture on dec. 28 in a newspaper insert. God had been preparing my heart for the message of this quote for a while and i immediately cut it out (im glad noone else wanted to read that part).

this is the reason for my new goal,this is not a "resolution" those are made to be broken it is  a change in the type of consumer i am.