The end of the year is only four months away. Are those New Years resolutions you made a distant memory? I stopped by WCIU to share tips on how to get back on track with hosts Jeanne Sparrow and Melissa Forman.
Health/Fitness
After New Years, you planned to hit the gym on the regular, but somehow life got in the way. Plus, between Pilates, Spinning to Pole Dancing, the options are dizzying and expensive, sometimes as high as $30 a class! If you can’t decide where to begin, try a service like Classpass, which lets you try all sorts of classes at a ton of fitness centers, without having to be a member at any of them. Choose how many classes per month you want, from 5 to unlimited and have fun experimenting. They offer trial memberships at value pricing (an example is $30 for 10 classes, and $3 per class) for the uninitiated. Worth a shot!
Save Money
How much money have you socked away since January 1st? Hopefully it’s enough for a rainy day fund or at least enough to buy holiday gifts, but if not, any easy way to jumpstart your savings without feeling the pinch is by using a cash back site like Splender when you shop online. With Splender, you can browse 100’s of your favorite stores for cash back offers (and coupons, too!). Once you click on an offer on Splender, you shop as usual and earn cash back! My suggestion would be that every time you receive your payout, automatically funnel that into your savings!
Organize Your Home
If one of your resolutions was to organize your home but your house still looks like a college dorm, try my 20-minute plan. It’s very simple, but for the unmotivated and time-strapped, it can be very effective. Tackle each room one by one, committing to spend 20-minutes a day working on it. You’ll be shocked by how quickly you finish one room and move onto the next. Throw broken things away, but if you have usable things you no longer want, put them aside for donation. There’s a site called Donation Town where you can find organizations that will pick up your unwanted things for free. The reason this plan works is it makes a giant job seem manageable. And it actually is!
Travel
You’ve been dying to travel more this year, but think it’s too pricey? I recently wrote an article about fall travel for personal finance site, GoBankingRates, and discovered that by using a site like Trip Advisor or Orbitz, there are great deals to be found, especially if you book a package, including airfare, hotel and even rental car. One of the deals was a long weekend trip to the Dominican Republic for under $500 per person from Chicago! Not bad, huh? You just have to do your homework and these sites make it easy.
