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After the year that we have just had, it is hardly a surprise that people are embarking upon 2021 with uncertainty and some amount of indecision. In a strictly metaphorical sense (for the moment, at least), the world has been knocked off of its axis and the coming year is one that will surely be hard to predict. If you feel like you didn’t get much done in 2020, then you’re not alone. The same is true of – probably – most of us.
There’s some good news in that. On balance, most people would agree that simply making it through 2020 was achievement enough. At certain points in the year, you could have been forgiven for wondering if it would happen. In addition, for many of us the past year has been a reminder of the lack of true control we have in life, and an added incentive to take a look at the things we can control with a more critical eye. Now that we find ourselves in a new year, there is the chance for a new you: financially, personally and in a number of other ways.
Of course, it’s tricky to build for an uncertain future, and right now we’re still pretty uncertain about a lot. But you can get the basis of a plan together and look with hope to the future, and below are some ideas on how you can begin to do that.
Work-Life Balance
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Our emotional response to the pandemic and lockdown in 2020 went through the whole breadth of the palette, from fear to hope to horror to optimism and through all the other shades. At some stage, if you were furloughed from work, there’s a chance you felt relieved to be able to have some time at home; it’s a normal reaction given how many hours we spend commuting, working and talking about work in the average week.
For some of us, 2021 means still being furloughed, or worse, being without a job entirely. In the latter case, it is vitally important to make sure you are aware of any financial aid from which you may be able to benefit. Another round of stimulus checks seems to be around the corner, and there is also scope for finding new jobs in the response to the pandemic. You may also find yourself in a position where working from home is the norm, not the response to a crisis, and where you can choose your own hours.
Customer service, freelance writing, and online tutoring are all possibilities which can be explored, and they offer the opportunity to turn working from home into a business going forward.
Finances
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The last year has been seismic in terms of its impact on people’s finances. While sheltering in place, how you make money and how you use it have both been subject to change. Whether or not your household budget survived the year, it seems like now would be an ideal time to start making some in-depth changes to your financial outlook so that it is equipped to deal with the changed world.
One step that can work for you is refinancing your mortgage, especially if you have by now paid down a significant amount of the principal. A refinance will allow you to pay less per month, be paid off sooner, or to unlock some equity in your mortgage that allows you to make other much-needed adjustments. Either way, there are benefits to looking at your options.
Perhaps the wisest thing to do with any additional money – whether from a refinance or from work where you don’t have to commute – is to create a fund that you can dip into should things get urgent at any time. While things are in a state of flux, having a contingency fund is a sensible step to take.
Personal
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It has been very easy, in the recent past, to become the kind of person who absorbs. So much is going on, and it’s standard to sit, take it in and react to it. In the last year or so, many of us have been on the “absorb” setting more or less non-stop. 2020 was full of jokes and memes about how long the year seemed to go on, and now that 2021 is here, some people are referring to it as 2020: Season Two.
It can be overwhelming, and it is certainly easy to be overcome by how much is happening, but in 2021 you have the chance to assert more of yourself, and there is no better way to do that than find a specific purpose. Devoting yourself to a purpose allows you to feel less like an extra in the ongoing psychodrama that is this world, and to become more of a recurring character. It gives you motivation and whether it’s doing more for charity, learning another language, or any other thing, it is an opportunity to change something, rather than watching change happen.
Many of us would admit we have become stuck in a rut, and in some ways that might have been the case even before the pandemic – but this new year can bring the impetus, and the global situation can offer the opportunity, to change things up for the better.
Educational
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You’re never too old to learn something new. There is no doubt that the world post-2020 is going to need to recover, and there is going to be an element of rebuilding required after so many businesses have fallen prey to the events of these tumultuous times. It is a crisis, and that’s a negative for sure, but every crisis holds within it the seeds of opportunity. To be ready for a world in which the message seems to be “let’s build back better”, it might be worth upskilling.
The world was already tilting towards a more online future, but 2020 has accelerated the pace of this change and it is going to be all the more vital from 2021 onwards. If you are looking for a way to be in the vanguard of change, increasing your tech-savviness will be a start. Learning how to do things like build an app, create online stores using SaaS platforms, or offer a service online that you used to do in the analog world, are all possibilities if you’re prepared to learn how.
Increasingly, people are finding that the best way to learn is by doing. Sit down at your computer and download the platforms you need: the likes of Appy Pie are popular for app-building, Shopify and WooCommerce are used by many to build online stores, and Zoom has enjoyed a year of unforeseen publicity as people take their services online. There are plenty more platforms out there that will help you do whatever you want to do digitally, and if you have some spare time as a result of recent events, it can be productively used.
We’ve all lived through the kind of year which, while not exactly unprecedented, seemed to be the stuff of dystopian fantasy until it happened. It means a lot of us are looking at the world and ourselves in a different way. The chance to really change things, in a way that New Year resolutions never truly manage, is one that we can all take now. Think of a few things you really want to do – perhaps from the above list – and decide to make the future a better place for you and yours. Are you ready to take the first step?
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