Plan or Not to Plan

Part of living a well balanced healthy life is having plans and goals. I am very structured person, for the most part that is a good thing. I always make sure we have money in the bank and bills are all paid on time. We have the money ready for vacations and emergencies. But sometimes you can get caught up in not being flexible. That was one of the reasons my issues with my daughter were even more difficult.

I had it planned out exactly how we were going to be debt free in 3 years and it was a good workable plan. It just didn't include life's little surprises. Those surprises are going to happen so you have to keep any plans you make flexible in your mind. Life just doesn't allow for everything to go smoothly all the time.

I have good friends that were slapped hard by this economy and never saw it coming. I'm sure some of them are having a hard time with how their plans have had to change also. I know some had their retirement plans all laid out for 20 years up the road and everything changed virtually over night.

It's good to have plans and you have to have budgets and goals. But you have to be mentally ready for set backs. I have now set new goals that are much less ambitious but will still let me accomplish my goals in 4 years instead of three. I also had to look at prolonging some purchases that I'd planned on like iPhones when we renewed our cellular contracts. We don't need them, nice to have but those phones with wireless Internet would be a $400 upfront expense and $60 more a month, nice to have but not necessary.

Now that I've restructured my plans to include dealing with our future addition to the family and come to grips with all the other aspects of it I'm sorta back to normal again. I'm prepared for the road to be a little rocky but hoping it's going to go smoothly. We are making some good workable plans there to. I hope that dispute the rocky path that this will bring our family closer together. This day and age it's difficult to have everything the way you want it but there's nothing wrong with shooting for that anyway.

As the saying goes, "It's ok to shoot for the moon because if you miss you still land among the stars".

Thanks for reading.

Happy Panda