Welcome to March! March is one of my very favorite months because my “twin” and I celebrate our birthdays on the 25th! This means my youngest will be 9 years old. That’s halfway to 18! Growing up I used to cringe when relatives would say, “You’re getting so big! Wow, time flies!”. Now as a mom I completely understand. Kids do grow up fast. They go from little tiny bodies that depend on you every minute of the day for survival to independent creatures who barely say hi in passing some days.

It’s so much fun watching your little ones grow up and start to figure out life but it gets a little harder every year whenever their birthdays come around and you realize that their time left living at home is becoming less and less and it seems to go by faster every year.

Wow, really went off on a mom tangent there! But man, kids. They change your whole life and I’m so thankful for all of mine.

Now it’s time for the monthly post I like to do where I round up my monthly goals and share them here for accountability and to remind you to do the same!

It’s time for new goals, y’all.

March goals

Fitness

I’ve definitely been doing really well with my workouts lately. It feels like I’m finally back and I can tell I’m getting stronger and my clothes are starting to fit better. I’ll take it!

My fitness goals for March:

Begin Body Beast. I’ll be finishing up Hammer and Chisel in two weeks and then I’m moving on to Body Beast! Hammer and Chisel consists of full body workouts daily and I’m itching to do workouts that focus on one main muscle group. I’ve had great results with Body Beast and can’t wait to see how I do on my third round.

Create, do and share 3 tabata workouts. I’ve always been a fan of tabata. What’s not to love about short, intense workouts? I plan to do tabata 3x per week this month after my regular workout. Each week I’ll do each of the three workouts I create and I will share each one on the blog too!

Financial

My financial goal for the year is to pay off as much debt as possible. I’m tracking all debt balances from credit cards to student loans and even our mortgage. I love watching the balances fall and it keeps me motivated.

In the last couple years I’ve learned something about myself. When I’m struggling with depression and/or grief, I tend to spend more money on things we don’t really need and it’s usually on credit. Not a good combo! I guess you could call it emotional spending? Now my focus is digging myself out and I’m working really hard at it because it’s super important to me.

March financial goals:

Save/budget money for 2016 taxes. We ended up owing right around $1900 (federal and state combined) for taxes last year. It feels like a setback because we could be putting that money towards debt this month but I’m thankful that we should be able to cover it with cash by the April due date. And yes, I have re-done my W-4 to prevent this from happening next year. I hadn’t changed it from 2015 when I only worked 6 months (compared to working all year in 2016) so I had not nearly enough taxes being taken out of my weekly paychecks. To figure out your ideal withholding numbers, check out this IRS withholding calculator.

Schedule all March bills.

Color in our debt free charts for total debt paid off in February.

Set up April budget in Every Dollar. I’ve never been good at budgeting but this free app makes it so easy. I’ve been using it for over 6 months now so it’s definitely working okay for me. I highly recommend it.

Blogging

My blog hosting came up for renewal yesterday and while Bluehost is a super affordable option for new bloggers, I decided to sign up with Siteground. I will say that Bluehost handled my blog beautifully when I had a HUGE traffic spike around Valentine’s Day and everything went smoothly. I was very impressed! Their customer service has been amazing and they’ve always been a huge help when I needed them.

I carefully considered my options for hosting when my renewal came up and ultimately chose Siteground because they’ve been getting great feedback from other bloggers lately and their customer service has been phenomenal. The reason I decided to make the switch was because I’ve been experiencing a lot more outages as of late and the back-end of my site seemed to be running slower than normal. It helped that Siteground is currently offering 60% off their shared hosting packages too so I opted for the GoGeek plan. I will share my first month experience with Siteground in next month’s goals post.

March blogging goals:

Continue using CoSchedule to help me plan my editorial calendar and social media posts. This is such an invaluable tool for bloggers. If you haven’t taken advantage of the free trial, you need to!

Brainstorm blog post ideas for March and April and plug them in to CoSchedule.

Publish blog posts on Mondays and Wednesdays. Last month I kept my promise of posting every Monday but I’m eager to write more so I’m adding in a post on Wednesdays too this month. I’ll also keep posting my monthly goals on or near the first of the month. Like today. :)

Write 20 good headlines for future blog posts.

Add more value to 10 old blog posts. Delete, combine and/or add value to posts as necessary.

Begin the Elite Blog Academy course! Elite Blog Academy is a very thorough blogging course for bloggers who wanna take their blog to the next level. I’ve been thinking about taking this course for well over a year now and I’m finally locked in. I’m going for it! Late last year I was able to get access to the first two modules through a special paid offer but I stopped the course halfway through because she has updated the course for this year and it starts in March! The course is created by Ruth Soukup, author of How to Blog for Profit: Without Selling Your Soul which I have listed in my blogger resources and I highly recommend reading her book if you want to become a solid blogger.

Personal

In addition to my fitness, financial and blogging goals, I also have some personal goals to work on this month.

Read one book. This month’s book is going to be Big Little Lies. I just started watching the limited series on HBO of the same name and it’s soooo good! I actually bought the book last year but hadn’t got around to reading it so I am right now. If you’re looking for ideas you can check out my 2017 reading list at the bottom of this post.