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Do you feel like you’re someone who’s super disciplined? Someone who can decide that they’re going to do something and just not have any issue with the follow through? I had a roommate in college who never seemed to have an issue finishing a task once he’d set out to do it. One day, he […]

In my blog post last week, I talked about how to use a credit card if you’re going to use one.  Credit cards can be like playing with snakes.  Remember, there is absolutely nothing that says you have to use a credit card. There are plenty of work arounds. Life doesn’t stop if you don’t […]

Oh the glorious perks that come with credit cards.  Those companies have us right where they want us. In the big scheme, they dole out small rewards and perks that never end up amounting to much and people go crazy over them. People love their credit cards. It can even turn into a status thing. […]

When Katie and I were first started out, I resisted getting into the investing side of personal finance.  When we graduated college, we were in the midst of a super bad hiring environment. The education budget was making it really hard for school districts to be able to hire teachers and in some districts, people […]

Have you ever heard of the FIRE movement?
FIRE stands for Financial Independence Retire Early and it’s a really big personal finance movement online right now.
Essentially, if you are aiming for FIRE, you want to save enough money that you’re able to retire early, like really early. People normally think of a retirement in their 50’s as pretty young right? Most people normally retire from working in their 60’s.

Does having more money make you happier?

I bet I’m not alone when I’ve asked this question.

I’m not sure if you’ve ever heard about the Princeton study that sought to find out if money makes people happier. This study gets quoted a lot because people like to point out that it says that money does make you more happy but only until your income reaches $75,000 a year. After that, the effect money has on happiness diminishes.

Have you ever heard the phrase “Live like no one else, so later you can live like no one else?”

It comes from personal finance guru Dave Ramsey. I’m a huge Dave Ramsey fan.

One thing that Dave always says that sticks with me is to “Live like no one else, so later you can live like no one else.”

It seems like a confusing statement, but if you hang on to it, it can really help you make it through some tough times.

It’s hard to believe that it’s been over three months now since we had that week that saw the announcement by the World Health Organization that classified COVID-19 as a pandemic and the entire nation shut down.

As often happens when uncertainty hits, the stock market took a huge dive in march. While it seemed scary at the time, I wrote an article that covered why I wasn’t concerned about being invested in the stock market even though it had tanked.

I don’t often check how my investments are doing in the stock market. Since I believe in investing in index funds that track the broad market, and since it’s going to be around 30 years before I actually need the money, I just don’t really check it much. If it goes down, I know it’ll come back up.

But COVID-19 has been anything but ordinary. People always talk about our new normal. This is not normal at all. 

In Thomas Stanley’s book Stop Acting Rich, he presents research that shows that most millionaires in this country don’t have super fancy well paying jobs, but that it’s just everyday folks who do a really good job of saving and spending within their means. 

To illustrate this, he shows some example of the different spending habits of people. 

He talks about a very small segment of the population that he calls the Glittering Rich, a group of people that truly are wealthy enough to be able to spend their money on whatever goods they want without running out. 

Remember, the goal is to make small improvements when attacking our goals.

We’ve learned from James Clear that we want to make small 1% improvements every single day. While this feels like we’re not making any progress in the moment, after a year of this steady progress, we find ourselves being 37x better over the previous year.

So if our goal becomes to live to budget another month as opposed to moving worlds to get that debt paid off your first month of budgeting, then we’re going to want to keep our budgets simple. Especially at the beginning.

I love YNAB. I literally have a shirt. And I like to wear it in public(shoutout to the other budget nerd dude who came up to talk because of that shirt).

But I’m going to be honest with you. YNAB is a little complicated. It really is a power tool that can do anything. I can really get my budget to behave in any way I want. But that will also mean that there is more of a learning curve with YNAB.

So how do you move forward with YNAB when it’s a little complicated?

First, you’re going to focus on living to budget another day. Second, you want to make your budget simple at first.