It’s that time of year that everyone is making lists, talking about who’s who and sizing up everything that happened in 2008. At the end of a year, your mind can also feed you some pretty tough questions about yourself. Why didn’t you lose the weight? Why did you not sell those stocks and get into cash? Why are you still single?

Why is moving so hard? Well, for starters, it’s the third most stressful event in a person’s life, behind divorce and death. Really! Perhaps it’s because moving happens unexpectedly sometimes (you or your significant other are relocated for work, for example.) Maybe the fear of the unknown gets us in the gut—what’s it like there? who will my friends be?—that we can’t seem to move through it. And then there’s the solitude. Even if you are moving with a partner, you just don’t expect to feel so lonely when you arrive in the new place.

With less than a month to go till 2009, we know many people are thinking about the past year and what they’d like to do differently within the next 365 days. The thing about resolutions is that we constantly set ourselves up for disappointment. Either the goal is too big and we’re upset that we don’t get there quickly enough, or we don’t surround ourselves with enough encouragement and support to follow through. Making a resolution is largely about making change easier. We don’t often want to do the things we’ve put our minds to because they don’t happen easily. But you can make your resolution work for you if you go one step at a time and learn to frame your goals positively (“I will do this”) instead of negatively (“I won’t do that”).

We’re just going to come right out and say it: staying in a bad relationship just because you a) don’t want to be alone for the holidays or b) don’t want to be the bad guy/gal who dumped someone during the most wonderful time of the year is a waste. Why wait until after the new year (or worse yet, after Valentine’s Day) to make a change and move forward? It’s not going to be easy, but isn’t it better to be free than to be dreading an impending breakup for the next couple of weeks or months?

Here are our top 5 highly unscientific reasons you should break up before January 1st:

Online dating has a pretty unfair stigma attached to it. After all, most of us probably spend at least half our day in front of a computer, so it stands to reason that we might as well multitask and meet someone there while we’re at it! Whether you’ve tried it before and been burned, had mixed results or are an online dating virgin (probably the only time you’ll ever be able to use that word again), there’s never been a better time to try it than now. There are the traditional sites like Match.com and eHarmony (which has finally gotten with the program by offering same-sex matching), as well as niche sites like Millionaire Match for wealthy individuals, FarmersOnly for rural dwellers, and TrekPassions for sci-fi fans. Who knows? You might just find the perfect New Year’s Eve date… and didn’t you say you wanted 2009 to be a year of new experiences? If you’re still mouse-shy, try a few tips from dating expert Alison Roth, who has consulted for numerous sites, including JDate, Match.com, and Yahoo! Personals, and helps people write profiles that get real results.

Already, the holidays are right around the corner, and before you know it, they’ll be here. But come Christmas Day, if everyone’s supposed to be brimming with cheer, why is mom crying at the stove and Uncle Pete hanging out down at the local bar? Probably because of all the baggage we carry into the holidays. Luckily, First30Days.com has created a how to guide to surviving the season. It all comes down to the Three F’s: family, finances, and food—and if we can add a fourth—fun! After the jump, how to handle your family during the holidays.

Raise your hand if you’ve never had a broken heart. You there, in the back? Yeah, you can leave. The rest of us know that breaking up truly is hard to do. They say it takes roughly half the time you were with someone to get over them, but who really has a year or two to kill the ghost of a relationship gone wrong? If you handle the first month after a breakup right, you’ll be on a better track to move forward more quickly. We’re not suggesting that you can get over it completely and wake up on Day 31 ready to jump back into dating—though if you accomplish that, we might want to bring you in as some kind of breakup expert. But there’s a lot you can do (and, yes, not do) in the first 30 days after a breakup to mitigate the fallout.

This week, one of the biggest changes to happen in eight years will occur—the United States will elect a new president. And depending on who wins, there’s a big chance your horse will come up short.

Some of you will be truly sore and deflated that your candidate lost, and threaten to move to another country or file complaints of voter fraud, but those threats are so 2000. If your candidate loses, it’s time for a new set of coping mechanisms to deal with the outcome. Here’s a list of 10 ways to cope with a president you didn’t vote for.