At the end of the year, I like to take to evaluate things that I’ve been working on throughout the year. I decide what things I want to continue and where I can make some of those things easier.
Taking the time now to look at these things helps me set up the next year. This is also when I have the most time off from work which gives me enough time to put some of these improvements in place.
First, I’m reordering my weekly tasks chart with the tasks to not skip when feeling unwell first. This is based on the things that make me feel like my world is under control. Which is meal planning/shopping, budget tracking, laundry, and watering my plants. The rest of the items can skip several weeks without much harm.
Making routine tasks easier:
Meal Planning/Grocery Shopping:
I’ve worked this year to make a short list of key meals that are safe to eat frequently. You can see them throughout the meal planning series blogs in 2021. To further improve this process and make it easier to stay on top of, I am going to save shopping lists in delivery service sites and hold some extra stock of snacks, breakfast, drinks, and some other shelf-safe items such as pasta noodles.
Backstock:
- Wide Egg noodles
- Lasagna noodles
- bullion
- soda
- electrolyte water
- Pop-Tarts
- Baked Lays
- Snack applesauce
- sweet snacks
- salty snacks
- TP
- Soaps
The goal is to not run out of the types of items that have historically led me to have food delivered. Food is my largest budget category right now. For more on that, you can read my blog about trying to cut my food budget in half for a month.
Budgeting:
One of the greatest hassles is exporting data from my bank to update my spreadsheet. For the longest time, there was no way to export the data into Excel which is what I use to budget. You can see my template in Google Docs here.
However, because I was looking to automate this process, I have stumbled upon where they have added the feature to kick the data out in Excel (2003) or Text. I just tried out both methods and unfortunately, the txt file imports with a ton more data than the Excel file, and the time format is wrong so Excel doesn’t recognize the date column regardless of me telling it what it is.
The Excel version is also problematic. It claims to have converted the information to date but it doesn’t until I double click inside each date cell. So it’s still an inconvenience but I’ll keep working on it.
PivotTables are fantastic for my type of budget because I adjust by top category but sometimes by store so for now, I dump all expenses by store into one line.
Here are some budget-related posts: tracking sinking funds and reducing food budget
Previously, I had simplified this process by bringing all my financial links into one bookmark folder. This helps make sure I don’t forget things…like property taxes. It has helped the process immensely.
Prescription refunds:
This last year, I’ve had to submit my EOB’s for both appointments and prescriptions and submit them for refunds. However, the manufacturer has created a prescription card to eliminate this process. I’m not sure if it will completely cover the appointments but I can call the specialty pharmacy to give them the card number and skip having to manually report the most expensive part.
Another thing that you can do is have prescriptions refilled automatically. I often have changes that get some items kicked off or they say due to some state or insurance thing, it’s not an option for some prescriptions. This is why I have to make a specific task to do this. For many, automatic refills are easy and work perfectly as intended. There are also options to combine your vitamins.
Another possibility for unregulated medicine is Pill Pack (by Amazon Pharmacy) which will put all your medicine together, including vitamins, and separate into what you will take at one time. They work with insurance companies and do not charge for shipping. I will be looking into this myself as I often struggle to get things refilled on time.
Including New Experiences:
Next, I’m including something I failed at this year, which is regular experiences. I had every intention to work in new experiences but did nothing new. It’s been very stressful and life should be more than working until you’re tired, sitting in front of the tv, and then blogging instead of sleeping because you’re an insomniac. Am I right?
I clearly don’t have a foundation to build off of here. What I do know is important, especially with COVID-19, my own health, and time limits are having local new experiences. The great thing about life is that nearly every experience is different in some way. We go through the motions and don’t even realize it.
While I was sick from COVID-19, I decided that I really wanted to learn how to bridge cards in the shuffle. So I had a deck of cards and I found a YouTube video that taught me exactly that. This guy’s got plenty more card tricks to learn too.
So, I’m starting to write down some things like that in which I can either learn or experience in 2 hours locally and hopefully without much expense. I’ve already recruited a friend and we are going to learn how to sing a Spanish pop song from YouTube karaoke. To be fair, my pronunciation will be terrible after only 2 hours and I was originally thinking of something along the lines of a children’s song or Christmas song that I could actually memorize. So this might be a few sessions. Another is skateboarding – only well enough to not crash into people and objects.
Comment below for any 2-hour things you want to experience or learn. I’d love to see your lists too.
