After celebrating my twenty third birthday in Washington State, I felt a change in awareness about myself. It was the first time i had returned to Washington in three years and only the second time i had been there in the past five years. What i realized was some of the habits I had unconsciously developed from my family. One of the most prominent habits was my spending. For the past three years I have been spending excess amounts of money, just as my family does, yet i lack the income they have. I have never balanced my budget or bought things on sale. I have always bought things new and at top dollar, just like my family. Yes, my family budgeted their finances when they were younger, yet I never really understood this process. The result of not understanding or caring about budgeting for me has been debt.

     Debt is something i want to eliminate and overcome. I have always made good money, yet the more i made the more i spent. However, I ‘m starting on a new path at twenty three and will be documenting the next three months of my lifestyle in English. Then this will be translated by my sensei’s at NACOS and myself into Japanese. Since Japanese isn’t my native tongue everything that i record will have to be practiced over and over again, which will hopefully not only give me an in depth look at where things seem to go and why, but give me the ability to describe my lifestyle in Japanese clearly.