Happy New Years Everyone!

You have successfully made it through another year. This last year could have been great for you or it could have thrown you through the wringer and left you wondering how much worse can life get. Either way, today is a new day.

Now, I am not one of those “New Year, New You” people. Life goes on day by day and a new year isn’t going to make that change. However, New Years Day is a good day to reflect and reassess. As preppers, homesteaders, and more, we need to do this once in a while to get our priorities and our goals straight and align them with our lives.

This last year for me was not a particularly good one. It had its highlights though. I wrote a book (do you know how long that was on my list of goals to accomplish? Years!)! My daughter and son-in-law had another baby. Some big goals were accomplished and some big goals were let go. This years also had some heartache and re-examination which was painful. However, I am not going to dwell on that for now.

This year though is a new year. However we identify ourselves, we need to sit down and think about what we truly want to accomplish in the next year. Winter is a good time for planning out and starting to implement our goals. Whether they are big goals or small goals, you should be thinking about what direction you want to go and what you ultimately want to accomplish.

You can start with basic goals. These are my basic goals for the year:

1. Saving even more money and practicing extreme frugality.
2. Wasting less around the home and food.
3. Prepping more.
4. Expand the homestead.
5. Become more profitable through the blog and the eBay store

Like I said, those are the basic goals that I can keep in mind. I know what my aim is and I can tell myself what I need to do every day. However, those goals are not specific and they don’t give me a direction to go.

These are my specific goals for the year:

1. Save enough money this year to purchase an older pickup truck this year, a small older utility tractor this year, and to purchase the acreage in three years.

2. Reduce food waste or completely eliminate food waste. I need to start a compost pile again. We also need to be conscious of what is being purchased and what is being consumed. We also need to be more proactive about canning and freezing food.

3. I want to double our food storage. We comfortably have three months of food on hand during the winter and four months during the growing season. I want to increase this to six months with a cushion of nine months.

4. Add a rain catchment system for additional water storage and use.

5. Pay off all debt except the student loan.

6. Add at least 30 meat chickens and five turkeys to the homestead and eventually the freezer this summer.

7. Finish writing a book about preparedness with kids. Finish writing my fiction prepping novel.

8. Double the offerings in my eBay store. Right now I have 620 listings and want to expand that to 1200 listings. The side hustles like this is what gives my family the extra money it needs to live and provide the funding for the projects. I will need to buy more shelving to hold the inventory.

9. Add a second garden and get it fenced in (or at least hot wired). I would like to start selling at the nearby farmers market to help add more income and reduce our food waste. I want to move the vining plants to a different garden to leave more room (and order) in the main garden. We will also be putting down black plastic to reduce the weeds.

10. Purchase a handgun and a rifle for hunting and protection. I have my conceal carry and would like to get a small handgun to carry where I can and for protection at home. We also need a rifle for protection as the chickens have become a target for predators. I also would like to start hunting and need to take the steps to get my license for that.

I am stopping at ten specific goals. I have smaller goals to make the specific goals happen, but they are a day by day and monthly goals and will need assessing all the time. I also will be doing a lot of monthly challenges as I find them on the internet and in Facebook groups. Right now, the Prep Club on Facebook has a make your own/cook from scratch challenge going now that I can certainly do!

Some of these goals do not seem to be prepping related, but they are all are. I also want to help you all to be better preppers. I take a self-reliance approach to prepping because that is the direction that suits me best. However, you need to do what is best for you in terms of prepping. I also like to learn skills for survival and in case I need to leave home. Being a well-rounded prepper will serve you better than being just an armchair prepper.

If you are interested in learning more about different areas of prepping, homesteading, self-reliance, and frugal living, I encourage to explore and learn as much as you can. Do not get comfortable with where you are in life! You should always be expanding your horizons and learning new things. Right now, I am fascinated with the back to the land movement, extreme frugality, and early 20th-century homemaking. You can bet I am learning all I can on these subjects and applying these things to my daily life as well as my goals.

I am here to help you all as much as I can. I hope to make this blog better and bigger this year with more postings on prepping, homesteading, self-reliance, and frugal living. I have some big plans and big ideas for this because I want to be an encouragement to you all. You all know that I am human and you are all human too. We make mistakes, but we are always learning and doing. If you follow me on Instagram, you can see all too well that I am human and I hope to be more real on there. If you need encouragement and ideas, you can follow my Facebook page or join the aforementioned Prep Club on Facebook for more ideas and support too.

If you need ideas for goals, last year I posted some goals that we all should be making:
10 Homesteading Goals You Should Be Setting This Year
10 Frugal Living Goals You Should Be Making This Year
10 Prepping Goals You Should Be Setting for The New Year

Please let me know in the comments what your goals are for the year. Also, please let me know what you would like to see in terms of content and subjects for this blog.

Happy New Years!

Thanks for reading,
Erica

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