…but I do see the value in them – so I’ll add my own to the mix!  What is the value?

• Gain appreciation and cultivate gratitude for the great stuff that happened to you in the past year.
• Reflect on what you can learn from the past year.
• Plant seeds of motivation for what’s possible in the coming year.

When I started writing out my year in review post for 2010 it began turning into a book.  Not good.  Too much editing.  But then I realized, it’s a review of a whole year, of course it’s going to be longer than my typical post.  So I broke it into a series of posts.

Why would you want to read this? That’s a good question.  I will confess that I’m writing this year in review and look ahead mostly for my own benefit (see points above) but I also believe there will be some value for my readers.  For one thing, it will give you some insight into the mind of a developing leader (and entrepreneur) and more of the things that matter to me.  At the very least it could get you thinking about what matters to you.  So without any more banter, let’s get started shall we.

a look back…

Since I wrote a “look forward” post around this time last year – I thought it would be great to resurrect it in pieces and see if what I wrote about actually happened.  So we’ll start there.

I said: My wife and I really want to work on paying down a lot of our debt.  It’s been an ongoing big deal for us but we’re determined to kiss our debt good bye.  As a result there’s going to be some difficult choices made as we cut out some of the expenses in our lives.  One of the tools I think will help us is this.

What happened: We still have debt but we did makes some adjustments and have managed to pay off close to $5k of our debt so far.  We’ve also established an emergency fund that has helped us out of a couple jams already.  The coolest thing for me though is we haven’t added ANY more debt to our Credit Cards.  We’ve paid CASH for all of our purchases this year – that’s HUGE.  Combined with the debt we paid off we have a VERY healthy financial start to 2011 and are on track to getting our debt eliminated.  I highly recommend Financial Peace University to anyone looking to get their finances under control!

What I learned: It’s very easy to get into debt – it’s very HARD to get out of it and even HARDER to start the process when you’re used to a certain way of living.  No matter how many ways you look at it – paying down the money you owe requires a change of thinking and perseverance.  Another thing I learned: there’s a HUGE sense of satisfaction when you start controlling your money instead of it controlling you.  My wife and I also had a lot less money fights this year because we got on the same page with our finances.

Where are you in your money situation?   Do you have lingering debts sapping your energy and ability to do the things you really want to do?  Have you been successful in becoming or remaining debt free – if so, what are you doing to stay there?

Stay tuned tomorrow for the next post in the series