Emerging New Year’s resolutions

I didn’t make any official New Year’s resolutions this year, but as January wears on I find some emerging. I guess that’s better than the usual pattern, whereby I would’ve already abandoned my good intentions by now.

The first one is this: Buying all my clothes at Goodwill or Salvation Army this year. (I would make an exception for socks and undergarments). I haven’t actually taken any action on this yet, but then neither have I broken this unspoken resolution. I just haven’t bought any clothes, period. But it seems like a workable and interesting experiment. So we’ll see.

The second emerging resolution has to do with a project I call the grocery holding company. The basic idea was to set aside some money to buy extremely discounted groceries, hold onto them until needed, and then pay the “holding company” a price that allowed it to make a profit, yet saved us money on our family’s grocery budget. I’ve been experimenting with this for over a year now, and it’s proved trickier than I expected. But I’m intrigued to see if we could fund some of our limited and inexpensive weekend getaways with this enterprise. Again, we’ll see.

Finally, in my ongoing attempt to develop a generous nature I apparently wasn’t born with, I’m working on how I contribute time as well as money. Up until reading “The Power of Flow,” by Harlene Belitz and Meg Lundstrom, I had been feeling pretty good about ramping up our charitable giving last year despite pay cuts and increased costs elsewhere in the budget. But then I picked up this book, which informed me that if you really want to get in on the generosity feedback loop that seems to be built into the physics of the universe, you’ve got to give up your time as well as your money.

This really made me wince, because I’m not really a people person. Most days I would rather read a book than have a conversation with almost anyone, even people I like and love. But it’s with this in mind that I consented to accompany my mom to Weight Watchers this week. (Which is actually an example of being generous with both time and money, since we can’t really afford it.)

Naturally I can’t help wondering: How do I get my $40 monthly fee back from the universal feedback loop? If I quit overeating, we would save that much money on our grocery bill? I guess it’s possible. A worthwhile experiment -- more worthwhile than trying to boil eggs in a dishwasher, anyway.