How do you stay on track?

This is really a question blog for me. How do you stay on track? When you have so many goals ahead of you and you are trying to keep your eye on the big picture-whatever that may be for you-how do you do it?!

Whether your goal is to pay off debt, or save money, or live on a budget for the first time...how do you keep yourself from getting off track?

I get discouraged. I see myself saving money, and clipping coupons and even taking the time to write about it, but at the end of a lot of days I still feel like I could have done more. And feeling that way makes me want to throw away my FLYBOOK, throw out all my coupons and go shopping! It's like I can SEE the big picture but I feel like I won't ever get there... everytime i'm on track--BOOM! Something happens...

My husband and I are taking this seriously. We have been working VERY diligently to save money, pay our bills and THEN think about what to do with whats leftover. It's totally been a change for us because while we always paid our bills... we made SURE we had some fun money and now our fun money is going into savings. HOW NICE!

Okay so we just knew that we were going to have to pay in for taxes this year. Jere bought a business this year AND he was a rep before that so he just pretty much waits around til the end of the year to see just HOW much we have to pay. The question is never WILL we pay but HOW MUCH will we pay. I had a good year in sales but also had some time in between jobs so I wasn't quite sure how it would turn out. Well--b/c of the expenses of buying a business, having 2 kids in college, buying vehicles, etc for the business we actually GOT MONEY BACK! That was something totally not planned.

So we decided to go away for a weekend. It would be FREE, esentially, and would be a nice little getaway for us. So we got to book our little trip away AND have money left over. Part of me feels GUILTY for not putting all the money in savings, and the other part of me thinks we deserve this. (But then my thinking goes back to feeling entitled for stuff...)

It's a journey -I want to stay on track but I don't want to suck the fun out of everything. I'm trying. Having this trip planned for us is exciting and to know we aren't going in debt over it is a god thing.

I've decided that I have to have "mile stones" to look forward to and when those are reached we can reward ourselves with something. (yes, seeing a big savings account IS a reward, but come on-we're human. we need treats.) I haven't picked them ALL out yet but i'm working on it.

So.. how do YOU stay on track on this financial journey? What do you do when you get discouraged?